Nickels in the USA are made from stainless steel.
But I am talking about any metal. If the metal is corroding, then it is releasing ions by definition. Corrosion is an ionic chemical process. Even stainless steel corrodes to some small degree. I can show you about 5 pounds of stainless steel knives and forks I dug that are corroded enough to have holes through them. But it all depends on the soil and how long they were corroding. Much faster corrosion happens to copper and zinc based metals, while gold is one of the slowest. But the release of ions from metal surface is not limited to coins. It also happens with buried pipes, lost jewelry and metal buttons and ornaments and other metal trash, as well as natural metal deposits and ores.
Maybe you didn't understand me about what I didn't detect. I have detected buried metals using a metal detector that was held above the buried metal, that seemed to have an unusually strong signal which returned to the normal expected signal after I dug them. This only happened a couple of times.
What I did not see is any pistol type detector or zahori type pistol detect what Esteban describes as the "phenomenon" around a buried metal from more than about a half meter distance measured from the side of where the supposed "phenomenon" is. In fact I don't know exactly what a "phenomenon cloud" is other than what Esteban described as being a cloud area around a buried metal that seems to be electric/magnetic.