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While that was once true, you're off by like 500-1000 years on the timeline for gold being a commonly struck currency, depending on what part of the world we're talking about.

Early Lydian coinage was like 40-60% gold and the rest silver, in an alloy called Electrum.

The first gold and silver coinage was issued by Croesus in the 6th century BCE, and then Cyrus the Great ran with that bimetallic system when he introduced coinage to the Achaemenid Empire, but that was pretty much the only time til the 15th century Golden age of Genovese banking, almost two thousand years later that gold coinage was again commonly used.

The Roman accounting system was based around the as, which was a bronze or copper coin, and then multiples of that, which were generally issued in silver or alloys like orichalcum (brass).

Charlemagne introduced the Carolingian coinage system which was silver denominated. This was the official coinage for the HRE for a few hundred years and directly led to more recent coinage.

However, debasement of currency was quite common during both of these eras and while sterling silver was pretty much always used in the British for example, other supposedly equivalent coins struck elsewhere would have entirely different metal compositions and the values became really hard to track as a result, so the origins of coinage became a more important factor than the supposed face value.

Under the Milanese House of Sforza, Genoa basically had the first two banks in Europe and went absolutely buckwild financing the entire continent with gold coins backed by slavery and set the stage for the colonization of the new world and transatlantic slave trade over the next few centuries.

TLDR: In the middle ages, gold coins were something that most people would never see or touch, there's like a 2000 year gap surrounding this era in which the entire continent of Europe pretty much just didn't use gold coins for major denominations that people would actually use because they didn't have access to gold.

There's also a lot more nuance to how coinage was actually used (or how it wasn't) in the medieval economy, but I'm sure someone else will help elucidate this as this is something I don't know much about.

We find evidence of lots of tokens being traded around, as well as ledgers keeping track of debt. Barter societies seem to be somewhat mythical, but so does extensive use of currency.

It seems more common that people just kept track of stuff owed or stores issued chits indicating credit. There's some evidence of some of these chits being used very far from the store that issued them which is pretty cool.

Yep, it's even in the Constitution:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.