Everything you do on Grateful Metals starts by finding a coin in the Reference Guide. That's not a marketing line — it's literally how the app is built. There's no "add a coin from scratch" form, because a private catalog is only as trustworthy as the reference data behind it. Grade, mintage, alloy, mint mark, variety, valuation — all of that has to be tied back to a canonical record.

Once you find the coin, the same card is the doorway to three things:

• Add This Coin to My Vault — catalog it privately with grade, quantity, date acquired, purchase price, personal notes, and photos. Values track PCGS references automatically.
• Add to Watchlist — a Premium feature that auto-matches hunted coins to live listings on Shakedown Street the moment they appear.
• List it on Shakedown Street — once a coin is in your vault, you can offer it for sale, or offer it for trade, to other collectors. Also Premium.

Free exists so you can try the vault workflow with a real collection before committing. Once you're past ten coins, Premium is the tier the community lives on — and the paid-tier verification is what keeps Shakedown Street trustworthy.

The community marketplace. “Shakedown Street” started as the title track of the Grateful Dead's 1978 album; by the 1980s Deadheads had co-opted the phrase as the nickname for the vendor-lined parking-lot midway outside their shows — a self-organized community of strangers who became family over a shared love, trading outside of any storefront or currency. The tradition later spread to Bonnaroo and the wider jam-band scene. That community-first trading spirit is what coin collecting is at its best, and it's the model Grateful Metals is built to be a home for. (More on this in the About page.)

Any Premium member can list a coin from their own vault — offering it for sale, or offering it for trade — so other collectors may buy it or trade for it. Grateful Metals doesn't take a fee, doesn't hold escrow, and isn't a party to any transaction — we run the listing feed, match listings against Watchlists, and pass messages between the listing member and interested members.

Anyone can browse Shakedown Street without an account — the full live listing feed, with the seller's actual photos and pricing. Interacting with a listing (messaging the seller, offering a trade, adding a Watchlist entry that would match it) requires a Premium account, because that's the layer where verification and community trust actually matter.

Two things reinforce that trust in practice. First, every direct-message thread has an Export PDF button — if a conversation feels off, export the transcript and forward it to the Grateful Metals admin. Every report is reviewed. Second, accounts confirmed to be acting in bad faith are suspended; where warranted, we offer reinstatement conditioned on accepting a persistent device fingerprint so the same person can't evade a future suspension by starting a new account. If multiple accounts are later confirmed to belong to the same person, all of them are banned at the device level. The full rules live in Terms Section 10.

The Reference Guide is a living project. It gets fuller every week, but there are still gaps. Two things happen there:

• Regular additions. While the request queue is empty, several new coins get added every month — at minimum — until the full canonical catalog is finished.
• Request a series inline. On the Reference Guide timeline, series shown with a dashed outline haven't been catalogued yet. Click Request this series right on the card and it goes to the bottom of a public queue. Typical turnaround is about two weeks. You'll get a notification when your requested series goes live.

The catalog priority is coins first, bullion second. Numismatic coins have a much larger surface of unique references (date, mint mark, variety, error, grade), and getting that data right is a lot of work. So bullion isn't fully catalogued yet.

In the meantime, bullion is request-only. If you stack Silver Eagles, generic silver rounds, gold bars, 90% junk-silver bags, or anything else with a spot-driven value: send a direct message to the Grateful Metals admin with what you'd like added. Bullion references get created individually until the coin catalog is complete, at which point bullion becomes the full-time focus.