Monnaie de Paris has turned forty years of Dragon Ball into a treasure hunt. The Paris mint’s new 2026 collection comprises thirteen 34 mm mini medals sold in sealed mystery pouches at €5.50 apiece, and somewhere in the production run sits a single gold mini medal of the dragon Shenron. Whoever finds it wins an exceptional pure gold medal valued at €3,500, a prize mechanic lifted straight from the wish granting logic of the series itself.
The timing is no accident. The Dragon Ball anime first aired in Japan on February 26, 1986, and the fortieth anniversary lands in a country uniquely primed for it. France is the world’s second largest manga market after Japan, moving nearly 33 million volumes in 2025 and outselling its own domestic comic book tradition, with Dragon Ball ranking as the third best selling manga of all time there. For a generation of French collectors, Akira Toriyama’s saga is not an import. It is a childhood.
The Collection
The thirteen medals split into ten common designs and three rarer silver coloured versions. The commons carry the early cast in gold coloured metal: Goku, Bulma, Kame Sennin, Krilin, Yamcha, Puar, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Chichi, and Piccolo. The three silver rarities, each flagged at 15,000 examples, raise the stakes with Goku, Goku as the Great Ape, and Shenron himself. Every medal shares a common reverse featuring the seven Dragon Balls, a fitting touch for a series built entirely around gathering a scattered set.
The portraits come out of the mint’s own Engraving Workshop, which describes the project as an attempt to capture the energy, humor, and spirit of adventure that define the saga. The lineup deliberately favors the original Dragon Ball era, young Goku on his cloud rather than the Super Saiyan years, which places the collection squarely in the nostalgia of the 1990s French broadcast generation.
The Chase for Shenron
The promotional hook is the one collectors will remember. Each opaque pouch contains one random mini medal from the series, struck in common metal at 15.8 grams and issued uncirculated, with the mystery bag carrying a total mintage of 285,000. Hidden among all of those pouches is one gold Shenron mini medal, and finding it wins the €3,500 pure gold prize medal.
It is a golden ticket in everything but name, and it does something clever for the secondary market: every unopened pouch now carries a lottery premium on top of its €5.50 face price. Monnaie de Paris has run playful products before, but attaching a four figure gold prize to a five euro impulse purchase is a genuinely aggressive piece of audience building for a 1,200 year old institution.
Formats and Availability
Mystery bags begin shipping from July 17 at €5.50. A Discovery Offer at €17.99, limited to 10,000 examples, pairs a collector’s album with two sleeves containing two different mini medals as an entry point to the series, though it is already showing as notify on availability. A standalone 2026 binder with thirteen cavities, priced at €9.49, is currently listed as unavailable, an early signal that the album side of this program may prove harder to secure than the medals themselves.
A Mint Reading Its Market
Monnaie de Paris has spent recent years testing how far a state mint can lean into popular culture, and the Dragon Ball program is its most confident answer yet. The format borrows from trading cards, the prize borrows from confectionery promotions, and the subject borrows from the single most beloved manga property in the country. None of it is traditional numismatics, and all of it is aimed at putting a first medal into hands that have never held one. If even a fraction of the collectors chasing Shenron this summer come back for the classical side of the catalogue, the world’s oldest mint will have granted itself the wish.
