Bankless - Why The Pokémon Card Market Is Blowing Up | Andy8052

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Pokemon cards are suddenly one of the hottest markets in collectibles. But why now, and what does it have to do with crypto? Andy8052 joins David to break down the rise of digital pack-opening platforms, the nostalgia-driven bull case for Pokémon, why grading companies have a stranglehold on the market, and how millions of dollars of real-world cards are slowly moving onchain. Are tokenized collectibles the next NFT comeback story, or just another frothy mania? --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS  0:00 NFTs to Pokémon Cards 2:59 Why Pokémon Is Hot 8:13 Nostalgia Meets Disposable Income 11:56 Brands, Influencers, and Hype 15:06 Pricing the Cards 16:21 Grading and Market Bottlenecks 22:16 Why Cards Still Aren't On-Chain 30:06 Inside Monster Strategy 34:40 Market Consolidation Ahead 35:42 Vaults, Shipping, and Logistics 38:13 Kids, Parents, and Collecting 40:45 Nostalgia Is the Real Bull Case 43:45 Where to Find Andy 44:35 Tokenized Cards and Stablecoins --- RESOURCES  Andy8052 https://x.com/andy8052 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Andy 805-2, welcome back to Bankless. We've had you on a bunch. It's been a while. Glad to have you back. It's been a long time. Yeah, happy to be back. Andy, you had your, maybe like, rise to fame. You were in crypto before this, but like NFTs and Andy really struck a chord.

Like you got, you resonate with it with the NFT market that was. Now you're doing Pokemon cards. It feels like the same thing to me. How similar is this whole energy? Yeah, I mean, I think, I do think there's a lot of similarities. I think at the end of the day, you're talking about collectibles, for the most part. Obviously with some NFT stuff, it wasn't collectibles, but you're talking about collectibles and just some are physical and some are digital. You know, I was, like, I was super into NBA Top Shot when that came out and like Cryptopunks and these different things.

And, you know, I just as easily was into basketball cards. I grew up with Pokemon cards. Like, Pokemon was the first video game I ever played. And so that was a really big part of my life growing up. And actually, I think, pretty formative into what I'm interested in now as an adult. And so I think there's a lot of similarities. Probably the biggest thing that is different is just, you know, with trading cards and collectibles being physical, there's just a lot more pain points around kind of the process of owning them, buying them,

trading them, all this stuff, where I think NFTs actually really shined in this, where once they started to take off, we started to see products left and right that were really powerful and made it super easy to have a full view of the market and participate and make sure you're getting the best price. And that's still very challenging with TCGs and trading cards in general. And so I think that's actually one of the things that has been pretty interesting seeing sort of the on-chain rise of it all. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's people buying things they like.

Just with trading cards and collectibles, it happens to be IP that has much larger valuations and bigger fan bases and longer histories of being around, whereas, you know, when we were like minting pudgy penguins or something, it's brand new IP. And so I think it makes sense that it makes sense that it. maybe had more intense hype cycles, but in a lot of ways, very similar. I understand the whole buy the things that you like argument. I feel like everyone has a thing. My thing is plants.

I spend too much money on plants. And butterflies. And butterflies. I have fantastic butterfly art. I just like those things and I'm willing to spend money on them. But like you could have bought Pokemon cards anytime in the last 30 years. And right now they feel particularly hot. Like there is like a big market out there.

Why are Pokemon cards hot right now? Yeah. It's I mean, it's kind of a loaded question. I think there's several parts to it. One is I would just, I would say the gotcha stuff is like, it's very real.

The demand that gotcha stuff was like all the like like monster and courtyard and collector crypt and all of these like people call it gotcha repacks. There's a bunch of different words for it. But basically any platform where you can go on and basically digitally open packs to buy cards, they have exploded over about the last year. And I think something that people don't really understand or haven't necessarily thought about the second order of is people are actually buying and redeeming cards from these platforms in very high volumes. People sell back a lot and people lose money and there's a whole other side to it. that I'm happy to get into,

but people are redeeming lots of cards. And then these gotcha platforms that are, they're having people buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of packs a month are having to buy more Pokemon cards. Hundreds of millions of dollars of cards a month. They are redeeming. So they're having hundreds of millions of dollars worth of volume go through their platforms.

Okay, okay. In aggregate. Like the platforms themselves are seeing hundreds of millions of dollars. Okay. And so then on average, And actually the biggest of these platforms are not crypto at all. The two biggest that exist are called Rips and Arena Club. There are no crypto at all.

And then you have courtyard and collector crypt and fidgetals are kind of the biggest of the crypto world. But so these platforms, you have about a, it varies on platform and on user, but most of the time users will sell back the cards they get. They offer you buyback rates and you can sell them back. But a non-trivial, like US dollar amount of the volume played through. is redeemed by users. It tends to be the high-end cards. But in our experience with Monster, it's about 30% of the volume played through 20%. It depends on the day and the cards and all this is redeemed by users. And so then you have to go back out and replenish that inventory. And so as all of these platforms have just been up into the right in growth, the demand that

they've had to buy is really high. And that's something that we've experienced as a smaller player in the space is you're competing against people who have just literally millions of dollars to spend and they kind of don't care what the price is because they just need more cards for their app to work. So that's one thing that is obviously massive. When you say redeem,

and I can pause there if you want. So like, yeah, this is like, redeeming feels like if we were talking like commodity markets, you're talking like oil, we like take physical delivery of. Yeah. But you don't have to. So like these platforms,

you can open them up on the platform virtually kind of in the same way you were saying, like, well, there's some merit to the NFT world because it was all digital and seamless and things just work better as software. And so there's been this rise of like non-crypto virtual-based card opening platforms, pack opening platforms,

where you open up a virtual card and then like you get to keep one if you like it and then you give the rest back, they buy it back from you at like 70% of the face value. They get some margins that way. And then if you want it, you can get shipped to you. and this market has exploded. I still don't get why.

Why has it exploded? So I think there's a few things there. And this kind of gets into some of my larger thoughts on why I think the Pokemon market has gotten so big, or not just Pokemon, one piece has exploded. Collectibles in general. It's not even just Pokemon. It's just collectibles broadly.

Yeah, if you go and look at the auctions for sports cards too, like, oh my God. That's not as talked about, I feel like, in kind of our circles. the sports card market, it's a little bit quieter, but it is like the volume is. Baseball cards. Baseball cards. So like if I go and pull up fanatics right now, who's one of the big auction houses,

and I go to their current auctions, they have like multiple cards in their current auctions that are already sitting at like million dollar bids and they don't close for. Are these historic baseball cards? we talking like Babe Ruth or I don't know like Derek Jee. I mean like Tani is huge. Is he modern? I lost track of modern sports. He's a current baseball player.

Okay, so current baseball cards. I don't know how much about baseball, but he might be the best baseball player ever. That's kind of like a whole other thing. People are going to get mad at me for that probably, but he might be. Okay. So these aren't just historical cards. These are current players, current cards. Yeah.

So there's like a Victor and Banayama card right now that's, you know, that sold for, like a little over $5 million about a week ago. It's like a one-of-one rookie card of him. This would make sense during COVID when there was helicopter funny money and money itself was distorted, but like we've had high interest rates. We've had sustained like four or five percent or whatever

for like three years now. And so this seems to be like, this is breaking my brain. Yeah. And I think, so I think part of it is as you get to especially with trading cards. If you kind of leave the sports side out of it, I believe the current target demographic of who are the real power spenders in trading cards are people who are around our age,

mid-30s, early 40s, who grew up with these things, and now they have real disposable income. And I think you kind of see this thing where it slowly gets more and more normalized to where it feels like you're not insane to spend five. grand on a Charzard because you love Charzard. And you have five grand now that you didn't have even maybe during COVID.

You were in your mid-20s and you're trying to figure it out. Yeah, you got laid off. Now six years later, yeah. And you have money and you're like, you know what? Yeah, I'll take some of my like, the S&P 500's in an all-time high. Like, I'll roll some of that and do it, Charzard. Why not? And so I do believe that that is part of it too where we're seeing more and more of kind of

this transition from collectibles as a whole. to being like this niche alternative asset to a bit more of an asset class that people are interested in as far as alternative assets go. But I will agree with you as someone who spent a long period of my professional career in the NFT space.

Like all of these phrases and things like really terrify me. I got a lot of PTSD from big Cryptopunks auctions and things like that. And what helps me feel better about it is I think that we very well could be at a local time. for the demand for Pokemon One Piece, these things.

But we're talking about the most valuable IPs in the world. We're talking about brands that have been around for 30 plus years, Pokemon's celebrating its 30-year anniversary this year. And so there's a lot of hype around all of that. And they're not going away. And these brands have shown that they understand how to manage and nurture the collectibles markets. And they clearly recognize the value in them. There's other brands that have not done that well.

For example, Yu-Gi-Oh, who was nearly as big as Pokemon for a long time growing up. Growing up, I would play both. They have not done a very good job of managing the collectability and all that. And they're trying to rectify that now, actually. What do they do? They just, like, minted too many or like... Yeah, they would just, like, reprint the same cards over and over again. Just kind of, like, hurt the value of the original stuff

and just not necessarily kind of, like, pay it the respect that you need from the original brand. And so part of the reason why Pokemon cards, and maybe baseball cards as well are doing well is like the OG rare Charzards are still the same card that they were a decade ago. And so there's some like property rights, property rights, social contract that has been retained by the people who have the power to print more cards. And so it's like, you know, we see that same Charzard reprinted, but it's always done with a twist where it's very obviously not the same card. and, you know, little things like that where it's more like it's paying homage to this like OG

where I think it actually increases the value and so, for example, this is a bit different, but so they, like I said, the 30th anniversary for Pokemon is this year and so they just rolled out, they're starting to release the new cards that are going to be in this pack

and a non-trivial amount of them are going to be reprints from previous years paying homage to popular cards over the last 30 years. And like all of the cards that have been announced in this, you would think that their value would go down because they're being reprinted,

but actually their value has gone up because people are excited about these cards that Pokemon's kind of like pumping their bags a little bit. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's very interesting. And so I believe that those are kind of the two major forces at play here where you have this like asset class that is really coming into its own.

And as much as I may not like it, influencers like Logan Paul and people like that I was hard to say there has to be a huge influencer social media layer around this whole thing as well. Yeah, and we watched this happen with NFTs too. This is just, you know, again, I'm going to keep saying this. It's like imagine if the same people who were pumping bored apes were instead talking about Pokemon then. Like, it's just a different brand. And no discredit to these NFT companies.

It's just different. And like Pokemon just this past year came out with a new game, Pocopia, and it was like considered the best Pokemon. game ever and massive success sold out everywhere. And so it's like they have this staying power that I think people are just kind of recognizing and getting excited about. And so all that's to say, like, I do think there's a chance we're in a bit of a local top with kind of mania around these different gotcha and repacking platforms. And like I go and vend at shows a good amount too. And like it's crazy. It's so competitive. Like the tables sell out within 30. It's like a speaker drop. It's frothy. Oh my God.

Yeah, like it's hard to get a table to vend at these shows because everyone wants to be doing it. And so there's a lot of things like that that give me pause. But my feeling is still that long term, that doesn't change the fundamental value of why people like Pokemon cards. And so maybe there could be periods of decreased demand. Like maybe after Pokemon 30 comes out and that whole bit comes to a close, there could be a low in demand. But there's always more catalyst with these things. It's like One Piece is kind of the second largest trading cards brand, which has gone just absolutely parabolic over the last like two years.

But people think Pokemon has gone crazy. One Piece is another level. Like there are... One Piece is like the alt coin that has performed, outperformed everything the cycle. It's the Pokemon, Genuinely. It's like Pokemon's Bitcoin and One Piece is Ethereum. And it's 2020, 2021. Yeah.

And so One Piece is for those who are not really familiar, it's an anime that has been around for forever. It's like, I don't watch anime personally. I don't know that much about it. I basically have only learned about it from the cards. It's the anime's been running for like over 20 years. I want to say 25 years and like is still beloved. Netflix is currently making a live action series of it. And so there's all these other continued kind of hype potential things that are coming. The brand is growing. Yeah. And and their trade, but so their trading cards actually only really started coming out in like 2021, 2022. There's people who could definitely come and give you significantly more history on their cards than I can.

But so they're not nearly as old. You know, Pokemon cards started in 1996 with like the original Japanese collection that came out. But like some of their most valuable cards over the last year have pulled like genuine 100 X's going from selling for like $1,000 to $100,000 type of things. And it's insane. Are there price charts for these or how do you, you just look? at the prices on the secondary market. There's no charts for this. Kind of.

And so that's an example where I think, you know, saying NFTs actually did this really well. Very quickly into the lifecycle of NFTs, there was all this data because it's all on chain too. There's all this information. There are charts. There's a website called price charting.com that you can go to, which gives you decently good information,

but not everything. And everything is very segmented. And so you have, you know, you have Right, there's no single source of truth. There's several different auction houses. So there's, there's the big auction houses are fanatics, uh, golden and, um, alt are like kind of, and then there's eBay.

And so like if you go and search like Charzard, yeah, there you go. And so click on like that first one. And so this is the original base set Charzard. And so you can look and see this is the ungraded value. So if you click on PSA 10 on the top right there of the chart, top right, PSA 10. Yeah. So that, that, that shows you. like the graded, like basically the pristine graded charzard.

And the interesting graded means there's like the actual physical quality of the card, like has it been bent or something? Yeah. Yeah. And so that's another really important part of the entire kind of Pokemon or just collectibles kind of market in general is these grading companies have quite the stranglehold on the industry. Oh, interesting.

So there are basically three major grading companies, which are PSA, Beckett, and CGC. PSA owns Beckett, so whatever. But PSA is kind of, they're the king of the castle. And so they, when you have an ungraded card and you want to get a graded, you submit it to one of these companies and they will, they charge you for it.

And it's kind of a racket and they make so much money. Do they charge you a five fee or do they charge you a percentage? So what they do, is they charge you a flat fee and then if it gets graded high enough where the value is higher they say if you want your card back you have to pay more if you want it back because the graded amount

otherwise we'll send it back to you on graded and you can try again. That is a racket. Yeah. That's an absolute racket. You get penalized for having a pristine card. Yeah. And so there's people who like genuinely couldn't afford

like if you have like an insane card that's worth like a hundred grand, there's a lot of people who like could genuinely not afford to get a graded. which is nuts. That is nice. So these places are all massively bottlenecked with grading. They're seeing like hundreds of thousands of submissions a day.

And so PSA and another one I can't remember who they just basically PSA just announced like we're not really taking new submissions anymore. They've basically said all of their like value, all of their value levels, you have to start paying like $100 per card just to get it graded just to get in the door. because their inventory was just getting way too high. It was taking six plus months to get a card graded. And so they have a real strangleholds kind of on the industry. And I think that's another kind of aspect of this that's interesting is there's a bit of like a, at this exact moment in time, there's a bit of like a liquidity crunch where you like can't really get new graded inventory into the market. And so I think that's something where it's been interesting where kind of naively you would think the cards that are

going to perform the best when there's these big gold rushes are going to be like super vintage cards that are from you know, 1998. And those cards have done quite well. But they've been equally, if not outperformed by a lot of more modern cards that maybe look cooler or more interesting. And I think a lot of it is these modern cards, they've gone up in value a ton, but people can't go and get them graded and say, oh, wow, this card that I had that I got for a hundred bucks is now worth five grand. Let me get it graded real quick and then I'll sell it. Like, you just can't really do that currently? And so the liquidity on these cards as far as inventory goes,

while Pokemon is still printing new cards all the time, is not growing as much on the supply side as you would kind of expect. And so I think that that is playing a decent part in this as well, where there's just never been demand for graded cards like this before, as that's what all of these gotcha and repacking platforms offer, or generally, it's what they offer. That's the most popular offering because it's more standardized then. And you can say, this is a PSA 8 card, which is generally worth this much.

This is what you have. And you don't have to worry about it getting damaged or something because they all sit in like plastic like this. Right. Like hard, hard plastic? Yeah. It's a hard plastic case. Okay. Yeah.

And it's sealed. I'm sure it's a pain in the ass to open it up. Yeah, I've never done it personally. I think you have to like take pliers. Wait, wait, that was a charzard, right? It is, yeah. Okay, so what is that? This is actually the exact chart that you have opened.

This is a Charzar graded number eight. That's the Charzar that I remember for my childhood. And that is a- Yeah, I need to ship this out to somebody. What's the grading on that? So this is an eight. That's an eight. Okay, so we can go look at this.

Let me share a screen again. We can go look at this. Share a screen back to this and still right here. And so is, am I looking at the right thing? So that's about $1,300. Yeah, yeah. And so let me see. So I use an app personally called Card Ladder.

card ladder on your phone. Yeah. And they do a lot of that tracking as well. They grab from a few more sources than price charting does. But there's a unified buyer here. So these are all, how do they get the data? Because when you're selling that to an individual, that was a peer-to-peer, you know, direct transaction.

You're not going through a third party, right? So they don't even know. So how do they know? So this card, we have it valued current. at $1,276. Okay. So they, so price charting uses eBay public data. I see.

Alt and Fanatics, the auction houses and golden. Cardlatter will track those as well and keep in, keep track of the auction house sales. But most of the market does move offline still. There is a really large volume of trades that happen at shows, people paying cash. a lot of stuff like this that is just not tracked. And so it's still very much a black box. You know, there's people who will go to a bunch of shows and buy 50 copies of the same card

and then go to the auction houses and bid up that card two or three X. And now all of a sudden you've three extra inventory. You've made some paper games. Yeah. And then you've got to go find people to Dumbon in person again. But people will try to do that. But yeah.

And so it's still a very, opaque market. We're kind of, right now it's a seller's market. You can kind of say this is what my price is and people don't really have an option but to pay it. This kind of makes me sad about NFTs because everything you're saying to me is like there's just broken market structure left and right.

We have these rating agencies which have this like random monopoly on things. It's like a very illicit. because there's so many different platforms. Like, NFTs fixed all of these problems. And yet the market is elsewhere. Like, these should have been tokens on Ethereum. And they're not.

And we had the NFT mania run in 2021. And it's 2026. And this market is not being posted on blockchains, WTF. Well, so what I would basically say to that is, I think there's a lot of people who will, discredit the gotcha and like repack platforms. They are really a Trojan horse to bringing all this inventory on chain. And I don't think people realize it.

But they are buying millions and millions of dollars of cards a week. And they are tokenizing all of them and putting them in these packs. And then users are holding them. And now they are. So like collector crypt, courtyard, fidgetals, Beezie. Okay, not the actual issuers. Not the first party issuers. No.

Oh, so it's all second party. You still have to have custody. So there's still some custodial risk where you're, you know, you're accepting that. You could be in solvents on your NFT. Yeah. But all these platforms are tokenizing millions of dollars worth of cards. And I don't think people realize that. But there's a longer, like, vision and larger, larger play here where a large part of this market is slowly but surely coming on chain because of this.

And I think it's going to take. and they'll be definitely pain points along the way. But, you know, they're starting to offer, like, lending against them and stuff, which I'm not totally convinced on personally, but, like, it's starting to happen. And so these marketplaces are growing. Currently, the, like, pack opening stuff is really the main draw and does, like, 99% of the volume. But these marketplaces do have volume. Because that's the, like, opening them packs is kind of the point.

That's actually, like, the foundation of everything is, like, that's the retail activity is like retail is opening packs and then that has such a large amount of demands that there's this entire secondary market around that behavior yeah and so now they're all building their own marketplaces that kind of look a lot like open c did back in the day where you're trading them as nfts like there's several really good apps out there there's one called like only slabs there's another called traded dot e that they will aggregate all these markets and you can like set alerts when people leave list cards below fair market value and things like that.

And so I have friends who don't play the gotchas. They just monitor the crypto marketplaces for cards that are listed below fair market value and then buy them and redeem them. And so there is, we're like starting to see more and more kind of come on chain through this, which I actually think is really cool. And it makes me optimistic about what the future of this could look like. But you're fighting against some absolute behemoths. in what eBay is doing and what even what like I was saying the non-crypto platforms like Rips are doing.

Like I think they're running circles around everyone else. But there's still a lot of time and there's still a lot of value that is coming on chain, which I think is pretty cool. Trading is changing. Not gradually right now. OKX just launched trading bots directly inside the OKX app. Grid trading, DCA, arbitrage. You set your strategy once and it executes around. the clock. No staring at charts all day, no manual entries, no missing moves while you're asleep.

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Search the Defi Report. Wherever you get your podcast, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now. Okay, so you're not totally bearish. You're actually like, okay, we got some of the things right with NFTs. Unfortunately, people, fortunately, unfortunately, people really want to trade real world collectibles,

not crypto punks as much. But nonetheless, the value of settling tokens on chain is still there. And because people prefer trading Pokemon cards more than NFTs, there is the whole encumbered process of getting them on chain. But nonetheless, we can still manifest the on-chain vision that we had in 2021. Yeah. And I mean, I still believe that there will be some NFTs that make it through whatever this is and become desirable collectibles

that look like Pokemon cards in 10 years or something. I just, you know, that takes time. It takes a long time to really build that because it's just so easy, you know, when the NFT market goes down 20% for any given collection, it's easy to be like, oh, well, that's it.

That was over. That was fun. When the Pokemon market goes down 20%, people aren't going to be like, well, that's the end of Pokemon, see you later. Right. Like, that's just not what's going to happen. And so I think that there's just such a big difference there

that just takes time. And it just takes build, building that brand and building the brand equity and awareness that these platforms have currently that NFTs don't really. Tell me about Monster Strategy. Yeah. And so we started kind of late summer of last year. And so we are one of these Gotcha repack platforms.

We have a bunch of cards that you can come and try to win from us. One thing that I think is really interesting in general from a lot of the crypto-based platforms, and we do this as well, is we actually offer, on average, the card that you pull, let's say you buy a $50 pack, is actually going to be worth $55 for us. And so I think that's something that's like kind of fun for users, and it's something that we see a lot where we have a lot of people who come just to build out a collection. And they say, I like the cards that you guys have. I'm going to come and I'm going to play.

And so each pack has a price, an expected value, which is the average, you know, if you pulled a thousand cards, this would be the average of what you got. And then every time you open, there's also an immediate buyback offer. And so for us, this buyback offer lasts for forever because, like I was saying to you, getting inventory is really hard. And so it's like, we will all. always buy back the cards that we've previously had. And so as you go up in price point, we offer higher and higher buybacks.

So for our $50 packs, it's 87% of fair market value. And we track that. So like if you buy the car, if you open a pack and get $100 card, you know, we offer you $87 bucks. If you hold it for six months and it goes up to $200, we'll offer you, you know, $174 to sell it back. And then like for our really high end cards, offer 95% buyback.

Because the liquidity is good, right? Yeah, we might have actually updated to 96 now that I say that. 96, yeah. 95%. And so for those, it's like for the really high end stuff, the liquidity is there and it's harder to get inventory. And so it's like, hey, listen, if you don't want this card, we'll basically buy it back from you at nearly fair market.

Right, because you as a platform are pocketing about 5%. Yeah. But so we also offer, you know, the average value on that pack when you open. is about 102, 103 cents on the dollar. And so the actual pocketing is less than 5% because we're on average, you're pulling more than you put in. And so if people came to our platform

and only ever pulled and never sold anything back, we would just lose money. But the reason, but you're trying to grow, you're trying to scale, and so you are trying to incent buying by literally paying people to buy because you make it back on people selling back some of the cards. And I also think that, you know, long term as we build out this product, and this is how a lot of these platforms operate and think, you know, the real users and the demographic that we want are people who love trading cards and who love collecting. And so we want to attract that type of user who is going to keep coming back because we restocked the platform and we added new cards. And maybe there's, you know, people message me all the time, they're like, oh, I really wanted this card, but someone else got it. Like, if you add another one, I'm going to try to get it.

And so I do think that that is like a real part of the users who we want to attract and who we want to be offering a service to. And, you know, as we expand over time, you know, the gotcha stuff is kind of just a way to get a foot in the door and it's a revenue leader. But we plan to really try to expand the entire offering of like how do you just offer a great platform for people who love to collect things, whether that's packs that you can open that are like real packs of cards, not. kind of these repackaged cards, different ways to build like wish lists and portfolio trackers and all these different things. I think there's just like a ton of space here. We haven't seen that much growth in a lot of the kind of tertiary stuff around trading cards and collectibles. It's been marketplaces and gotcha platforms and everything else. As you build out tech in the space, you realize like it's really hard to find what the fair value market of a card is. It's really hard

to find all the sales history. It's really hard to even build out your own portfolio tracker or like, you know, there's stuff that exists, but none of it's amazing. And so I think there's just like a ton of space to really service people who love trading cards and love collectibles and build out a platform for them. There needs to be some consolidation in this market, right?

It feels like, you know, the growth stage of crypto where there were like 17 B and C tier exchanges, Bittrex, and the other weird ones that no one remembers anymore. And we just need some consolidation down to some fewer platforms. Does that sound right? Yeah, I think we will definitely see that. I think to a certain extent, you know, different platforms have different offerings that are interesting.

You know, some platforms target Eastern audience, some target U.S. audience. You know, some only have PSA cards. some only have vintage cards. And so you kind of have these like different people, doing different things, trying to find what makes them unique. But yeah, I think long term, if you don't have some sort of unique distribution angle or way to, some unique user base, there will definitely be consolidation among the top players.

How do you manage all of the physical cards? Like where somebody buys a pack and they say, I want this one, please send it to me. What happens in the background? Where is the card? How do you send it to them? That's a great question. So a lot of the auction houses that exist also offer vaulting surfaces. And so this is a really interesting thing that exists.

All the auction houses offer vaults that exist in no sales tax states. And with the way that online purchase sales tax work, when you buy something, they have to charge sales tax based on where you ship it to. And so if you basically like buy and ship to their vaults, you don't have to pay sales tax on the purchase. And so they basically offer this as a way to keep people in their ecosystems. Right. Long term.

And so the way that we manage our inventory is we vault through these third parties. And then when people redeem, we send it directly to them from our vaults. There's times where we can't do that. And so I have cards in front of me because they're going internationally and this vault doesn't ship internationally, and so I have to So they ship to you and then you do it for them? Yeah, and so that's something that we're actually very actively working to improve. It is candidly a ton of work.

How many times have you gone to the post office in the last month? I was there this morning. So many times. So we have a lot of international users, actually. I send out like seven packages today. So if anyone's watching this, you probably have some Pokemon cards on the way. But, yeah, and so it's a, pretty big pain point and we're actually

pretty far along in talking to a team about consolidating everything. The other challenges, you know, there's times where all, like I said, I go to card shows as a way to get inventory because that's where there's a lot of cards at these shows and you can

it depends, but you can generally get them below market value at the shows, especially if like an average person just kind of comes to a show and they have maybe they brought $1,000 worth of cards, but they have other cards, but they have other new cards they want to get. And so you can buy them for maybe $8.50 or $900 cash.

And then they'll go out and go try to find whatever they're hunting for. And so when I get those, then I have to package all those and mail them to the vaults. And it's a whole thing. So I'm really actually looking forward to consolidating to one vault. That should be happening pretty soon. I think we're getting like the legal docs today to sign and do all of that. What are the kids? are kids doing this?

Like, I remember when I was five, 10 years old, you know, we all, in first grade, we all had show and tell, and everyone just showed off their Pokemon collection because that was the thing we were doing. What are the kids doing who are in first grade? Are they in this market? Do they care about Pokemon?

Like, are they collecting packs in the same way you and I were when we were children? I can't say I'm talking to a ton of first graders. But what I will say is every time I am vending, there are many parents with their kids who come by. And it's a very different experience. They're not coming to buy graded cards,

but it'll be a dad and his son and his, like, I very distinctly remember, like, this nerdy little, like, eight-year-old and he was looking for this one Pokemon that looked like a bug that he liked. And so I had to Google what the bug was so that I could see what Pokemon it could be. And I actually ended up having the card that he wanted.

And so I was able to, I just gave it to him for free because it was like a dollar. Nice. But there are a ton of kids who are coming, but it's just different. Right. And as would make sense. Like when I was a kid and I was buying Pokemon cards,

I was playing the card game with my cousins and with my friends. Right. I didn't care at all about what the value of the cards were. I wish I had. But so that's still seemingly very real. And like I said, I think that the games and stuff really help with this. Like I said, this new Pokemon game that came out, Pocopio was like absolutely massive.

My wife put in like tons of hours into it. I know a lot of people did. I think a lot of kids really enjoyed it too. And so, yeah, it's a different world for them, but there definitely are kids who collect. I think that would probably be, you know, as you think about what are the risks to Pokemon as a brand? Right. 30 years. It would be that that next generation falls off.

that currently 30 to 40 year olds love Pokemon or doesn't people who are 20 right now when they're 35 and they have disposable income, are they going to love it? Are they going to want to be buying it? Yeah. Yeah, I suppose a small fraction of the market is thinking I am buying this Charzard

as a 30-year investment plan. And I'm not saying many people are doing this, but like some are. And the fact that some are kind of incensed the rest of the market to just play the game. Yeah, definitely. And I think that, you know,

there's just, there's something really powerful about the emotional nostalgia side of it. Like, like I was saying earlier, like for me, Pokemon is just a big part of my life. I have an extremely distinct memory. My first memory of Christmas, like, as a child, was like I was four years old and Red Version came out

and I didn't know how to read yet. And my dad had to sit next. me on the couch and tell me what to do in the game because I couldn't read, but I was playing Pokemon Red version. And like, that was just like how I grew up was playing the Pokemon games. I would, there was a comic book store around the street. And from the time I was like eight years old to like 14, anytime I would make any money mowing lawns, shuffling driveways, I would go to that comic book store and I would buy Pokemon and Ukio cards. And I think that it's really hard to like quantify what that is worth and what that nostalgia.

means to people, but it does mean a lot. And I think that that's something that can be easily discredited by someone who doesn't have that same nostalgia. But like I was, I got together with one of my, my older cousin who kind of, he was really who got me into Pokemon. He's about five years older than I am. And I was talking with him and he's married with kids. And he had, I remember, like an insane Pokemon collection.

And I was talking to him about it. And I was like, yeah, if you know, if you, he was talking about wanting to retire. early. And I was like, you probably have like genuinely hundreds of thousands of dollars of Pokemon cards sitting like in your basement right now. Like if you want me to help you look through him and stuff, I'm happy to. And he was like, I just don't want to sell them. Like I, I know, but like I really don't want to. Like I don't even want you to go through and and price it out for me because I don't want to know. I just, yeah. And so that's the kind of stuff that I think makes it really hard to say like what's what's the value of fandom or what's the value of one person

saying I want to buy and keep this thing because there's probably a lot of lot of people who have that same sentimental feeling. That's amazing. Yeah. I think the tweet that burned this idea into my brain was some like seemingly like pretty legit research study about millennials of people our age have a center in their brain because so much of their childhood time and attention was spent on Pokemon, like thinking about Pokemon, collecting Pokemon cards, watching the TV show, playing the video games, that there's like a center of cluster of neurons grew to be our Pokemon center of the brain.

And like enough millennials in the United States or just abroad have the Pokemon center in the brain that's like has like a rich identification and nostalgia and the feeling that like this Pokemon center fires because so much of our childhood time was spent thinking about Pokemon cards. And like it's literally in our brains, dude. Like the bulkcases in the brain. It's in the brain.

I haven't seen that. I'll try and find that tweet and day it up. I mean, I believe it. I definitely have the Pokemon Center brain. Yeah. I'll believe that for sure. Andy, this is great. If people just want to, like, I don't know, learn more,

dat and, like, tinker with Pokemon cards, where can we send them? Yeah. Our Twitter handle is MNSTR. It's just a monster without the vowels. And our website is MNSTR. XYZ. My Twitter handle is Andy A-052.

And I tweet about Pokemon cards. and all this stuff all the time. Actually, I think based on some conversations earlier today and recently I'm going to maybe go into a bit of a deep dive on Twitter of everything I've learned running one of these gotcha platforms and doing all of that. Because I think that there's a lot of one misconceptions, but also people are just really curious of like, hey, what does this like?

What does it kind of look like when you say I'm working full time in the trading card world? So I'm going to start kind of getting into that stuff a little bit more and trying to pull back the curtain a bit. It should be fun. And to be clear, all of your calls. cards are tokenized? Not, not currently. So they were at one point, we migrated blockchains.

And so basically for the sake of speed, they are not. We will one day be air dropping people new tokenized versions of them. Currently there actually isn't that much value for us because we don't have a lot of the bells and whistles around it to do that. Okay. But when these platforms are. So like courtyard, collector crypt, fidgetals, Bezzi, they're all. NFTs that you get on your platform.

Cool. All right. So if we're bullish NFTs, maybe the canary and the coal mine is how in demand the on-chain version of the Pokemon marketplace, how much that grows. And what I will say is probably even the bigger thing is the stable coin payment side of it is massive because there's a lot of fraud in these markets.

Oh, chargebacks. So being able, yeah, a lot of chargebacks and all that kind of stuff. You know, when you go to these shows in person, no one accepts cards. No one accepts it. You got to pay cash. Wow, you come with cash, huh? Yeah. And so I think that's like a big side of it as well.

Well, okay, yeah, there's one half of me is like, damn it, crypto, what are we doing here? And then the other half of me is like, oh, we've got this. Like, we have the solutions here. So it takes people like you and the other tokenized platforms to build it out. So Andy, God's speed. Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Cheers. Banko Sanchez you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. So are Pokemon cards, as Andy said, there might be a local top. But who knows, maybe the tops keep on topping. This is the frontier stuff for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on The Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.