Unchained - Why Pokémon Cards Are Better Onchain (and How to Trade Them) - Ep. 898

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Pokémon cards are no longer just collectibles stuffed in a binder. They’re becoming liquid, tradable assets onchain. In this episode, Collector Crypt CEO Tuom Holmberg and Bitwise’s Danny Nelson explain how the project is reimagining the $100 billion trading card industry. From slashing eBay’s 13% fees to near-zero, to solving decades-old authentication problems with vaulting and NFTs, to launching a token that surged 700% in weeks, Collector Crypt is pushing trading cards into crypto rails. We also explore whether this is the start of a “Polymarket moment” for collectibles, how these cards could be used in DeFi, and if mainstream investors might soon allocate to Pokémon decks alongside BTC and ETH. Thank you to our sponsors! Re Walrus Guests: Danny Nelson, Research Analyst at Bitwise Asset Management ⁠Tuom Holmberg⁠, CEO of Collector Crypt Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🛒 2:35 Why eBay’s fees are so high and how Collector Crypt cuts them down 🎴 7:50 How a Pokémon card collector would actually trade onchain 🔒 9:40 What security measures protect vaulted cards 👤 11:13 How Tuom’s background led him to build Collector Crypt 📉 13:14 The highs and lows of launching the app over time ⚖️ 21:24 How the company navigates copyright issues with Pokémon 💰 23:05 Why the $CARDS token surged 700% in weeks 🏦 28:28 How Collector Crypt makes money ⚡ 29:43 Why the team chose to build on Solana 🌍 31:43 How big the trading card market could get onchain 🔮 35:03 What’s next in Collector Crypt’s roadmap 🔥 39:25 Why Danny Nelson calls this a “Polymarket moment” 🖼️ 41:31 What makes digital trading cards different from other tokenized assets 👀 45:06 Why Collector Crypt grabbed so much attention last week 📊 49:22 How traditional funds could start investing in trading cards 🌐 52:04 Whether trading cards are about to go mainstream 🔗 53:40 How Pokémon decks could even be used in DeFi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In many ways, you know, it's a reimagining of the way collectibles are traded. And, you know, I think we are seeing kind of like the very earliest scrape of extreme product market fit for crypto solving an issue that's been percolating in the real world for decades. I went to the card shop last night. I bought this shiny Charzard. I'm actually not a Pokemon card collector. I'm a baseball card collector. I do wish I was a Pokemon card collector. I was going through my baseball cards this morning, just looking at them thinking, these are worthless. What was I doing with my time? I should have been buying Pokemon cards. I am not a Pokemon card person, but I know people who are very much in this world. So my ears perked up about this new training card game phenomenon that's been picking up steam.

Tom Holmberg of Collector Crypt is a crypto-O-G. He and his team have been working for years on CollectorCrypt, which is an on-chain trading card marketplace, and which is taken off now with the recent launch of their cards token. I was fascinated to hear the creative ways the team has solved the problems that collectors face, the ways he thinks that this phenomenon can grow, and how it can extend well beyond Pokemon cards. I also chatted with Danny Nelson a bitwise, who had some great insights into how Pokemon cards differ from other real-world assets and why he thinks this could be a breakout moment for trading card games and for further mainstream adoption of crypto. I hope you enjoy this double-head.

Earning yield on stable coins just got smarter with RE protocol. Get up to 16% APR plus points through regulated insurance backing and ETH thesis strategies, with no lockups required. Deposit USDC, USDT, or die to start earning stable yield and points today at re.xyZ, RE.xYZ. At Unchained, we believe the future should be decentralized, and that includes our data. That's why we use Walrus, the fast dynamic verifiable data layer. Learn more about the platform that's powering our future at walrus.xyZ. Welcome to Wom. Hi, Lauren, nice to meet you. So trading in Pokemon cards on chain has taken off on collector crypt, partly due to the

launch of your token cards. And in general, actually, digital trading card activity has been reaching all-time highs recently. Explain what problems you're trying to solve for Pokemon card collectors and also how collect your crypt works. So two-part question. Sure. So I'll start with the problems. I mean, you know, in the 80s and 90s, I know Pokemon only came out in like 96, but trading cards, you know, in order to trade cards, you'd go to a card show, you'd go to your local game store and you'd have a table and you'd go and trade cards with other people. You'd see them face to face. You'd be able to talk stories. You'd be able to talk about all this kind of stuff that. that is really enriching.

This is a hobby. This is a passion, right? So you'd be able to do something that's enriching. You know, eBay came and from a financial side of it, you know, really improved, you know, trading cards. Because now, instead of being confined to your local liquidity, you know, let's say you lived in Rhode Island and you had two local game stores to trade. I mean, you know, that friction, that liquidity has a cost. But now all of a sudden, you can trade with people in California. You could trade with people in Oregon and you have much deeper liquidity on both.

both the buy side and the sell side, which makes trading a lot more efficient. But, you know, because eBay is a business and a company, you know, eBay needs to make some money to, right? So eBay started off with like 5%, you know, fees for transactions that happened. And then slowly as they became more monopolistic, they gained a little more power. Also, eBay has to start dealing with a lot of fraud issues, a lot of support issues, and all of these kind of things to protect their users. So it's all understandable why the costs went up. But today to sell a card, and obviously if you get to higher value cards, the percentage is a little bit lower. But just the base level is around 13% transaction fees.

And I think a lot of people, they kind of scratch their head and say, well, you know, I'm trading with this other person over here. Right. And eBay's kind of there in the middle. They're taking 13%. And, you know, I might be defrauded. You know, the card might be sent. That's not really what I wanted. It might be damaged.

It might be lost in shipping. shipping, you know, if I'm international, I have to pay for customs. I may never make it, whatever it is. But, you know, I'm taking all that risk anyway. So how about I just go and Venmo the guy, you know, some money and not pay eBay the 13%. So eBay came in and really made it difficult for buyers and sellers to, you know, communicate and to negotiate and to figure out what's best for them to kind of protect both buyers and sellers as well. You don't want to like negotiate with somebody who's trying to con you.

but also to protect their margins, right? But, you know, remember I said a couple minutes ago that a big part of the passion is being able to sit at a table across somebody and talk to them about, you know, where they got the card. Maybe they started collecting, you know, with their dad who was a big card fanatic baseball card guy. And, you know, you started collecting because every single time you pick up that 52 Mickey Mantle rookie card that's now worth millions, you know, it brings you back to that moment with your dad where he kind of sat you down and told you about it. and all that kind of stuff. So it's like, it's literally an imprinted memory, imprinted nostalgia, imprinted childhood on these cards. And when you eliminate the ability to communicate,

you can't really tell that story to the person on the other side. And so, you know, with the advent of blockchain, with the advent of being able to have permissionless trading of assets, you could bring that table back. And you could let people communicate with each other over that table and talk about it and be able to do these trades in a permissionless and safe way because with our platform, the cards are stored in a centralized vault and they're authenticated. And the physical custody is with us, right?

So the NFT custody that we tokenize is with the users, right? So the users can transfer the NFT, but the physical custody stays with us so that whoever purchases that NFT knows that at any point they could redeem that physical asset and they know it's been authenticated and because we take high resolution scans, they know exactly what they're going to get. So through this process, we're bringing back the tabletop. We're reducing the fees from 13% to basically zero. A lot of our stuff still happens over the counter in our Discord and all that. And we are eliminating, you know, 99% of the way that people defraud each other. So in many ways, you know, it's a reimagining of the way collectibles are traded. And, you know, I think we are seeing kind of like the very earliest scrape of extreme product

market fit for crypto solving an issue that's been percolating in the real world for, for decades. Oh, this is so interesting. Okay, because I was wondering this, this bit about the physical aspect that you mentioned. So you guys actually retain custody over all the physical ones until somebody redeems their NFT and then you and then you would ship the physical one to them. Is that how that works? Correct. So you can think of us kind of like an escrow company, right? So we are holding this asset in escrow and we're authenticating it so that everybody knows

that it is what it is. And then whenever somebody wants it, they burn the NFT through our platform and we ship it out immediately. Okay. And then yeah, your expertise is also what's helping prevent the fraud. It's like you you guys are probably more expert at spotting fraud than just. the everyday collector. So like walk me through this. So let's say, because, you know, I'm sure like 99.9% of all Pokemon card collectors are not using collector crypt yet. So let's say that they hear

about this and they have, you know, a card that they think would, that they would like to, you know, put on collector crypt. What happens? Like they, yeah, just walk us through step by step how they do, how they do that. Sure. So they would come to our. platform, they would go and create their account. We don't require KYC. We just need an email verification. They go in and click the deposit button. Then in the deposit link, they kind of say, well, here's how many cards I'm shipping in. Here's a description. We let people kind of like choose their own route. Those that are pretty meticulous about their cards are sending in high value assets. They're very detailed. They'll say, I'm sending this card. PSA is a grading company.

I'll say it's been graded by PSA, got a grade of 10. And here's the individual serial number. for that card and they'll list 50 cards. You take all 50 of those cards and stick it into a box, so you hit the deposit button, it will give you an address where to ship it to. You send us that box and then you put in your tracking number on our platform. So the FedEx tracking number, UPS, however you want to ship it, and then we track that package as it goes through when it hits the vault, the people at our vaulting partners, they go in and they will authenticate the cards.

They will take extremely high-resolution scans of the cards, verify that everything is up to par. And then we get all the metadata from the vault, and then we mint the NFT directly into that same wallet that that user initially created that deposit with. So we don't have to interact with that user at all. They can send us, you know, we've had people send us hundreds of cards in shipments to get in.

Okay. Oh, this is so interesting. So basically, in a way, like for you guys, the custody aspect is almost like, hopefully this isn't too extreme of a comparison, but it's almost like cold storage because those physical hearts also have value. So you need to like protect those. And whoever is holding the NFT at that time, they are in a way trusting that you actually have the physical. Yeah. And you bring up a really important part because, you know, there are, we are using third. party card vaulting facilities and you know specifically we're using fanatics collect and psa vault both of

those vaults right now are holding in excess of two billion dollars worth of trading cards each they have extremely high security they they they know exactly what they're doing and psa i mentioned is the the number one grading company in the world so the psa is essentially authenticating their own cards coming into the vault so it's hard to do better than that i mean we we have some ideas to open up our own vaulting facility just because of the volumes that we are dealing with to be able to provide a better user experience. But I think we really need to figure out exactly, you know, how to keep that same high level of authentication, that same high level of security that we've fallen in love with fanatics and PSA. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because I would imagine in a way that's like the basis

of trust for what you're doing, you know, because everybody, you know, we always talk about how Crypto is trustless. So tell us how you came to found collector crypt. Yeah, so I'm a serial entrepreneur. I'm a little older than the typical crypto founder. I am bald, though, so that's good. I know a lot of other founders are bald. But I started out in high tech in the late 90s in software.

Then I went to business school. I spun out a biotech company from UCLA, basically, you know, ran that company as chief business officer and on the board for the next 15 years. years, we raised a little bit over 100 million for it. Did a small exit in the 20 tweens kind of area. And, you know, I've, because I wanted to get back into software and, and, and I had this idea about like, you know, if you love, if you love trading cards, yeah, this is a pudgy, pudgy penguins card.

This is one of the vibes cards. If you love trading cards, trading cards are basically a piece of paper with intellectual property on it, right? NFTs are pretty much the same thing, except instead of paper, you have code and you have intellectual property embedded in that code, right? So it was very easy for me personally to like understand the value of NFTs early on. And so, you know, it's a funny story, Laura. You know, I was, I was at the Costco in the refrigerator section listening to your podcast. I think it must have been 2016 or 2017. And you were, you were talking to a guest about Cryptokitties and how it nearly destroyed Ethereum.

And I said, what the hell is this stuff that you're this is crazy? And then, you know, that's kind of like you, you really inspired me to, you know, learn about NFTs, learn about, you know, the potential to use them on the blockchain. And just, you know, listening to your show, you know, really, you know, brought me to the level of education that I needed to come up with, you know, collector crypt in around 2021. Oh, wow. Okay. Oh, you're, you're an OG then because, you know, at that time, yeah, I wasn't doing, you

even that many shows. So I was curious, like, you know, I guess you've been building it now for four years. So, you know, how did collector crypt grow during that period? I'm sure there were things that you tried that maybe didn't work out. So like what, you know, did you do to get to this breakout moment? Yeah, good question. I mean, I think, you know, people see our kind of like overnight success and say, wow, these guys came out of nowhere, you know, let's try to copy and duplicate it.

And we have a number of platforms that are trying to do that. But really in the first year to two years, you know, we raised a small venture round in 2022 from some really good VCs. We spent all of that money building kind of like the back end infrastructure, you know, how to manage, you know, users information when they're depositing cards, how to manage the card burn, the NFT burn process to ship the cards out, how to do all of these particular steps in a very safe way so that, you know, you could have a family office in Monaco feel comfortable enough to have us. ship them $30,000 worth of cards, right? So that back end took the bulk of the funding that we put in. And the front end is really just to skin over this kind of whole tokenization engine. So it took us a year to build the back end. And then we started developing relationships with

platforms in Solana. So we built a really good relationship with Magic Eden, built a really good relationship with Famous Fox Federation that has a lot of tools using their raffles and this kind of stuff. And, um, We did our first launch with Magic Eden almost two years ago. And so, you know, this was Magic Eden basically saying, hey, collector crypt, they're going to do a mint, an NFT mint on the platform. You're going to get, you know, packs. And these were just NFT packs. And then what we did was the packs could trade.

And then we froze the packs. And then we airdropped, you know, some of these actual trading cards, the Pokemon trading cards. That mint sold out within one block time of Solana. So we had like, I think, I think 80,000 views on the page and like 6,000 wallets connected for that mint. And there were only 175 packs. And so that minted out in one block on Solana and that just kind of kicked off the whole thing. And then for the next 12 months, you know, we did a mint pretty much every month. We did about 10 to 12 minutes or something.

We really focused on building our community, right? So some of the early people that came in, you know, these guys are just, amazing Pokemon, savant, crypto whale deep pocket kind of people. And so we spent the next 12 months listening to these guys and building the best product market fit that we could. And that's kind of what kind of originated all of the different pieces of our platform. So we have our marketplace. The next tool that came out is our sniper. So our sniper is essentially you could use USDA from anywhere in the world.

and you create an escrow on our contract, and you put in an eBay ID number. And what we do is once we have that escrow contract locked in and the eBay number, we will bid on that auction two seconds before that auction closes. Right. And so pretty much from anywhere in the world, now you could use crypto rails to use USDC to bid on eBay auctions. And that's just a massive unlock. I mean, I think people in the United States probably don't really understand, but if you are in Zimbabwe and you're trying to like get that one card to give your son for his

birthday because he wants a Pokemon card, how do you do that, right? How do you bid on stuff on eBay? You're going to pay 6% foreign exchange fees. You're going to pay, you know, $40 shipping and handling. You're going to pay 25% import tax. You're going to do all this kind of stuff. And then it's probably going to get lost or stolen in customs, right? Because the guy who shipped it in Missoula, it took the card and stuck it in a shoebox with

duct tape. And so, you know, being able to like use USDC in this way is a massive unlock globally. And we've done about $10 million worth of bids on eBay with this tool, winning about a million and a half dollars worth of cards for our users. So that's been a really incredible piece. And then the thing that people are just all in rave about right now is what we call our gotcha machine. So our gotcha machine is a digital repack machine. So we essentially have. a portfolio of trading cards. And we go in and say, well, you have an 80% chance to hit a common card, a 15%. So we kind of build this mechanism and then, you know, people come in and pay $50 and they get,

you know, based on whatever probabilities come out, a random card out of the machine. This isn't new, right? People have been doing repacks for decades. So why digital repacks? Why this? the reason is that the velocity of money on crypto is so far higher than retail, and the cost per transaction is so far lower. On retail, if you're paying for a repack with a credit card, you're paying credit card fees,

you're paying sales tax, you're paying all this kind of stuff, right? So all those fees get added in, and then the person doing the physical repack actually has to do a lot of work. They have to take this card. They have to package it. They have to make it look nice. They have to get space. All of this stuff can be just on a website, right?

And so first, you could do a digital repack far cheaper. And instead of charging the user 30% fee, you know, negative expected value, you could charge a 0% fee, right? So courtyard is kind of our big cousin in the space. They kind of innovated this digital repack mechanism, so give them full credit. We took it a step further. So instead of doing a zero EV, so selling these cards flat, we actually have a positive expected value, gotcha machine, meaning that you put $50 in. On average, you'll get $55 worth of cards out, right?

And then you could sell back those cards for 85% of market value. And I'm throwing out a lot of numbers here. But the end is that, you know, we've created kind of like not a slot machine, not a gambling machine. We've created a digital, you know, gamified digital shopping experience where you could get the thrill of opening and ripping packs and having that kind of random variance in the outcome, which people find exciting, especially in trading cards. But more than that, you're not going to get extracted too hard, right? You could come in.

Yeah, sorry. I wanted to understand something. So what you're saying, that difference, like, you know, you would put in $50, but then you would get $55 worth of cards. You're basically saying because you guys are cutting out things like the credit card fees and all these other fees, that's how you're able to do that. Like the rest of the marketplace has to fact. that in, but you guys don't have to. Is that what you're saying there?

Yeah, digital repacks don't have to factor that in because the cards are all stored in sales tax-free states, right? So the cards are all stored in Delaware and Oregon, which have no sales tax. We don't have to deal with any credit card processing fees or anything like that. And then, you know, because we are our platform, the founders are all very deep trading card people. We know how to source this inventory at 85% market price, right? So we're getting, we're in a able to eliminate just a tremendous amount of cost and we essentially just give that all to the user and that that enables us to transform this slot machine into like this gamified shopping experience where you could come in and let's say you want to buy you know a thousand dollars worth of cards and have some fun doing it you could put a thousand dollars worth of funds usdc into the machine

and probably walk away with a thousand dollars or even more of of trading cards so it's like you know in my three decades of experience being a collector, it is the most efficient way to sell cards at essentially market price, right? You know, you have dealers out there sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory. We go through hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory in one hour. Like yesterday, we did one and a half million dollars worth of packs. And some of those packs were resold, but we sold $150,000 worth of cards in that one hour period of time. Okay. So one other thing that I needed to understand here because like obviously Pokemon is a, you know, there's a company that that's their intellectual property. So when you

talked about like the packs that you were giving away with your NFTs and how you guys put, you know, these cards in the gotcha machine. So there are physical cards and all of those that were given away and or put in the gosh machine or whatever. Those are all ones that you minted from existing cards and those are like kind of your collection you're deciding to give them away. Is that how that works? Correct. And I think you're bringing a very, very good point up because one, you know, we only use actual scans of the cards that we actually own, right?

So that means that that scan is our intellectual property. And two, you know, we don't use any Pokemon branding in any way. We don't say we're affiliated with a Pokemon company. you know, we 100% respect their IP and don't want to mess with that because, you know, they've created something that is such a cultural phenomenon and we don't want to take from that. We want to enhance the user experience to be able to interact with the Pokemon franchise in ways that they've never been able to do before. But yeah, and then like, you know, for example, I think it's also illegal if we didn't own

the cards that we put in our machine. I think that violates lottery and gambling laws. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, no, I just, because I was trying to think, like, wait, how would they, I was just realizing that, well, they can't create those digital versions out of thin air. So I just wondered how it worked on the back end. So as you mentioned, also, you know, you launched your own token, this cards token a few days ago. The price, you know, has just really gone up. It's up 700%. I think that's part of

the reason why we're seeing this little trading frenzy. Tell us about the token. Like, what's the purpose of it. How do you expect people to use it, et cetera? Yeah, good, good set of questions. You know, we're we love our platform and, and you know, we were a little surprised at how quickly it reached these valuation levels. But I think that's what the lesson you're learning crypto is that there's a lot of really smart people and they're going to figure out faster than you will. Our idea with the cards token is basically to be a liquidity pool of trading cards, right. So we did a launch with the Metaplex launch pool last week, you know, great, great team. And part of the promise to the launch pool participants was that every penny that we got out of that,

you know, net of creating a liquidity pool and Metaplex fees would go to buying more trading cards, right? We haven't taken any of that money for the team. And the idea is that as the platform generates these profits, and to date, we've made around $7 million of profit this year, you know, for a three-person company with very little overhead, right? That's not bad. We're going to pay the team probably a little bit better, but I'm not out there buying a Lambo or anything. Trust me. You know, this money is, you know, all of our radium launch liquidity pool fees, launch proceeds, you know, fees from like this machine and the profits that we get, we're going to stick that back into the cards token and buy more Pokemon cards and buy more

sports cards because what we want to do is we want to be the best source of trading card liquidity on the blockchain so that our partners and other people who are interested in accessing this trading card space with a trusted party that is built the most amazing back-end and logistics pipeline for these things can go in and just build a front end for their own utility and utility meaning let's say if there's a game and you're fighting dragons in the game wouldn't it be cool at the end of the game once you beat the final boss, you get a random Charzard card out of there. And this Charzard card could be like a special prize. You can implement Defi, right?

Let's say you have, you want to borrow against your cards and you want to go in and use this, the money that you borrow to buy more cards or to do something else with it, right? Totally happy to enable all of these other, you know, participants in the, in the, in the permissionless world that we call crypto to come in and build using our. card liquidity pool. So what we want to do is we want to build up this liquidity pool of trading cards and we want to generate revenue for the cards token by our own kind of platform like the gotcha machine, the sniper, our marketplace, as well as allowing people to build on top of it. And you're going to see some amazing partnerships and collaborations come out in the next few weeks.

Interesting. Like meaning you're going to try to use the token to foster even more of an industry around? I mean, because I know you're not just going to. to stick with Pokemon, you're going to go off and do like sports and whatever. So is that, did I understand that correctly? Yeah, you understood. So let's say if there's a, you know, think about Funko Pops, right? That's another collectible. It's kind of like different than our platform, but we have all of the infrastructure to support Funko Pops. So let's say if somebody wanted to create a Funko Pops marketplace and create a Funko Pops gotcha machine, right? We can handle all of the logistics on the back end. They can basically just create the website and, you know,

then they would use our liquidity for the Funko Pops, which we will own on their platform. And we would do a revenue share with those guys. That revenue share would go to the token treasury and that revenue share would go to buying more trading cards or to even buying back the token to support the growth and expansion of the token price. Five, ten years down the road, one of the hardest asset classes to penetrate, like if you're a family office, you have 250, million dollars worth a net worth. And you know, your guys at Deloitte, your financial advisors say,

well, hey, you really should get some exposure to collectibles. And you say, well, you know, I really love baseball cards with my dad growing up. And they say, well, that's great. You know, baseball cards have grown 15, 20% percent per year for the last 50 years. And okay, well, how do I buy that? Right. And they go, oh, you know, give your nephew three million dollars and stick them on eBay and buy some baseball cards. You know, that's not the way. What we want to be able to have is like this asset that, you know, is essentially has a huge, you know, maybe this asset in five years is going to have $100 million worth of cards in it, $200 million worth of cards in it, and it's also going to be revenue generating because these cards are going to be used in all of

these platforms across blockchain as well as across Web 2 as liquidity, right? So now you could invest in this asset class of trading cards and even have a natural yield baked into it because of all of the utility that these trading cards are creating. And so, you know, maybe one day, one day, there will be a trading card ETF. That'll be very easy for people to get to. And I think we're the closest to getting there. I don't know if it's possible, but, you know, that's kind of where our 10-year vision is. Huh. Interesting.

So there's like a few different entities in a way it's like you're kind of trying to create this more decentralized network, but then also you have your actual company. So how does your actual company make money? Well, our company doesn't really make too much money. We're basically paying ourselves as developers, right? So we're all in the United States. We have a software development company. And essentially, you know, our foundation says, well, here's some money to pay your salaries.

Right. You know, everything else is kind of staying in the foundation. It's going to go towards building this trading card liquidity pool. It's going to go into, you know, building this network. and this connection to solidify us as the main source of trading card liquidity on chain. So, you know, that's kind of how we think about it. I mean, yes, you know, the founders do have an allocation of tokens, right? We cannot touch those for another 12 months. And I'm going to, you know, I'm really strict on that, as people will say. Like, but yeah, so if we can continue to build and

achieve our vision and goal in 12 months, the team will get some liquidity, but only if the, if the, if the, if the, if the, if the, if the, the cards token continues to perform. Okay. And you mentioned earlier that you worked with Metaplex on Solana for the NFTs and your token. So, you know, there's a lot of talk about different chains and obviously there's a lot of competition between the community. So like why did you choose to go with Solana and Metaplex? Yeah. So, so when we initially made the choice, I think it was down to like three, three candidates. We had Ethereum, we had Polygon and we had Solana. You know, Salana at that time in 2022-ish, you know, kept on having outages, kept on, you know, there was a lot of fud around like that.

But just the performance was incredible and just being able to like do that many transactions per second at that cost was crazy. And then I remember right at the point where we kind of made the decision, there was this game, like this Farmville game that popped up on Polygon. and Polygon was, you know, had like, you know, 10 cent transactions or something. And then this, this silly little game popped up, like called Farmville. And it spiked the transaction fees on Salana from, I mean, sorry, on Polygon from like 10 cents up to like $7. And I'm like, yeah, you know, maybe, you know, Polygon has a little more, you know, way to grow. Or maybe there's some issues with it's interacting with ETH that caused these fees to spike and all that kind of stuff. So we chose at that point to go to Solana because we felt that the engineering issues around the network outages and that kind of stuff were solvable.

You know, we just didn't understand like, you know, whether or not the layer two versus layer one kind of like issues would be solvable. I mean, I think they pretty much have at this point. But, you know, we just got very, very lucky because Solana has kind of emerged as this awesome, you know, retail chain. You know, they had a lot of really, really awesome NFT mince go out, you know, DGNABs, Galactic, GECD, those all these guys, these OGs. They're such amazing communities and such amazing people. And we're just so happy to be able to build this over there. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like it was the right choice. Like if you just look at, you know, what's happened. And if you think just about the type of, you know, business that you're trying

to foster and seems like it would make sense. So I did also want to ask like just how big do you think this market could get? Because, you know, I was curious, like, for first of how big the Pokemon trading card industry is. But I'd be, I'd love to hear like, yeah, your vision or like where you think this could go. So trading cards, you know, graded trading cards, which are kind of like the sub of trading cards that would be appropriate for this kind of thing.

You know, we estimate that there's around $100 billion worth of trading cards in circulation right now. And that's far in excess of all NFT collections put together and bigger than all meme coins put together, right? So, you know, we're assigning, you know, unicorn valuations for marketplaces that deal with meme coins and NFTs. And trading cards are kind of like outside of the crypto circle right now. So trading cards are bigger. You know, there's about $25 to $30 billion worth of annual turnover in graded trading cards, primarily on eBay, on Fanatics Collect, on whatnot, and then all of these over-the-counter things that happen at trade shows and that kind of stuff.

There's around $30 billion there. And those all carry high transaction fees, right? So you're dealing with the lowest eBay at 13%. And then you could take a look at like Heritage and Golden and Christie's and Sotheby's. You're looking at 25 to 35% transaction fees on those marketplaces, right? What happens if you go and create an environment and ecosystem where you drop those transaction fees to basically zero? I would say that the liquidity and the turnover is just going to increase exponentially because now I can buy a card and hold it for a month and then resell it without having to pay 13% transaction fees. So I can kind of capture the trading of specific assets.

And this happens in Pokemon, but more importantly, it happens in sports cards. Maybe you buy a bunch of a rookie card and then that rookie winds up being like the best rookie of the year at the, you know, know at the, you know, world, world championship series. And so, you know, I think that being able to improve the liquidity, reduce the friction will take that $30 billion and could triple it or quadruple it. And I think when you do that, you're also going to elevate, you know, trading cards to a much more of a, you know, respected asset because you improve the liquidity, which means that larger participants can come in. So I view this. This being the cusp of a major, major bull market in trading cards, not only because Pokemon's 30th anniversary is next year.

But I think unlocking this liquidity, getting rid of the extraction, making people have an opportunity to enjoy their hobby in ways that they want to. You don't want to be behind a screen on dealing with a robot. You want to be able to interact with real people and trade in a real way that is safe globally. Right. I think this is all going to, you know, significantly improve the dynamics of the trading card ecosystem. Yeah, it seems like, yeah, I could definitely see it exploding. You know, I just think about like simple things like communication before the internet. You know, every letter was like so precious. Now we wake up and there's like a kikazean messages everywhere.

Last question. What's up next for a collector crypt? So we have our sports machine that's probably going to go live in about a, you know, hopefully a month. We're going to do our best. I don't want to put any timelines because we're obviously not that smart. You know, we, so the sports machine is coming up. We also have, we're building the world's best pricing Oracle, right? So one of the things that's very difficult is on trading cards because, you know, it's very sparse. There's a lot of cards that might only trade once a year.

So how do you value these things? And it turns out that that's a problem that is probably best addressed by a graph neural network or something like that to go in and really look at interactions between different similar cards and how the values of these different similar cards evolve over time. So nobody in the world has built a robust price Oracle for trading cards. So we have on our roadmap the ability to do that because once we have a really good price oracle, we could feed that into an automated market maker. We could feed that into more data and more efficiency for our users to be able to figure out what a card is worth. What should I list this card for? What should I buy this card for?

It'll give you much richer data to be able to do that. And we want to become like the locus of kind of this like high-tech evolution in trading cards. where people come to us first when they're searching for a price, when they come to us first, when they're searching for a card, when they want to do some gamified shopping on our vending machine, when they want to snipe some items and hopefully get a 10, 15% discount on those items. We want to become the global dashboard for trading cards. So these are kind of pieces that we're building over time, and it's going to take time. All right.

Well, Twam, it's been such a pleasure chatting with you and learning more. about this craze that's happening right now. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Really honored to be here, Laura. Thank you so much. And heads up, everyone. We have a second interview with Danny Nelson, research analysts at BitWise, and we will start our chat with him right after this short break. Traditional stable point yield often comes with hidden risks or long lockups that limit your flexibility. Read changes that with two transparent, regulated options, They earn both yield and points. Re-USD offers up to 8% APY, backed by ETH-BASIS strategies, or treasury bills,

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I'm back now with Danny Nelson, research analyst at Brent Wise. Welcome, Danny. Good to see you. Laura. You wrote a tweet thread unpacking this trading card game phenomenon that I just was talking about what's wrong. So you said that you think these trading card games are going to have their polymarket moment. What are you seeing there? What did you mean by that? Yeah. So what I mean is one of those moments where some idea in crypto has exit velocity and can break out into the regular world or the non-crypto world and bring people into the crypto world. So with Polymarket,

Polymarket really didn't create the vertical of prediction markets, but it brought them to scale and it allowed people who were fans of the idea without even realizing it to start engaging with it and in doing so brought new people into crypto and became a leader in the field. And I really think that the tokenization of trading cards has a similar set up for itself. Like, I have a friend of mine who quit his job recently to buy and sell Pokemon cards full-time. He's not doing it in crypto, he's doing it on other applications. But the process that he has to go through, you know, he acquires the cards, he goes to card shops, or he goes on Facebook Marketplace and finds collections, he looks at cards, he gets a sense of their value,

And then he sells them. Now, once they're sold, he loses a fee to the platform he sells it on. He has to package them carefully and ship them to people. And then those people, they're speculating on cards too. They'll have to do the same if they're going to sell it as well. And it's a very inefficient system for a marketplace. It's worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as we're seeing with the activity just in the last few days on courtyard and on collector crypt.

So I really think that the tokenization of these trading card games has that potential to speak to the bottom world. And I also think that it brings new opportunities to make use of these assets within crypto. You know, in your tweet thread, you actually kind of made a distinction between these training card games and other types of real world assets. So can you talk about that? Like, how do you see this as being kind of a, you know, a category that has some. distinction. Yeah, sure. So the focus there is really on the state that the market's in.

And we should think about this with regards to tokenization. So a lot of times we're talking in the media about tokenized stocks, right? Now, you have to think, well, what is the actual benefit of tokenizing a stock? Sure, there are some efficiencies you can trade at 24-7, but there are a lot of limitations, too. And the reality is that stocks already have a very very very important. have a very robust trading platform. And so the jump from your brokerage account to your crypto wallet, sure, it brings some efficiencies and it brings some upside that you might not have had before, but the solution was pretty good already, right? It's not some, it's not a step

change in the same way as with trading cards, because this is a, this is a medium that really is physical. Like I went to the card shop last night, I bought this shiny Charzard. You know, it's great to have it in my hand, but if I want to trade it with someone and they want to buy it, it's very inefficient to actually move these products around. You can't, there is no real other market to facilitate these kinds of transfers. eBay does have some systems that allow the cars to be held to escrow and to be sold along, but then you're losing a lot to the fees that these legacy platforms charge. And so with tokenization, I really do think that trading cards as a physical medium, there's

a lot of opportunity there to bring them on chain and to have a lot of benefits because of it. And I was curious, like, how do you think this market will change now that once it becomes more digital? Like in your tweet thread, you mentioned something about how, you know, once you make it digital, then the market has a unique attribute that it doesn't have in the physical. which is what you called exit velocity. So talk a little bit about like what that is,

why it exists, and then how it might impact the overall trading. Yeah, sure. So with the exit velocity, that was really the sense that I was getting from just experiencing the the gacha machine of collector cards. I actually tried it out a couple times. And I'm not, you know, I'm actually not a Pokemon card collector. I'm a baseball card collector.

I do wish I was a Pokemon card collector. I was going through my baseball cards this morning, just looking at them thinking, these are worthless. What was I doing with my time? I should have been buying Pokemon cards. Regardless, there was a sense of fun that could be had with the ripping of the digital packs. And I think that they really nailed that experience really well, recreated the thrill of opening up a card pack, whether it's baseball cards, whether it's Pokemon cards. That is, it's the same thing that leads people to unboxing videos for technology online. People love that. that shared experience of watching a big reveal, a surprise.

And when you're trying to replicate the digital world, it's really a question of, well, how can you foster that experience? How can you make it work? And I think that the formula that they've come up with really does work very well in that regard. So one other thing is, you know, you mentioned some of the competitors to collector crypt. And I know you're not a Pokemon card collector,

But I wondered if you had any thoughts on how collector crypt has had kind of this breakout moment in this digital space and like what you think distinguishes them from competitors. Yeah. So the reason why everyone's talking about collector crypt right now is because the token launched a couple of days ago. And it did very well because in those first days, no one really knew how to price this. I was seeing there were some tweet threads, people, full posting thing. You know, this is bigger than people are making that to be. It took about a week for that actually to yield any results, but once it did, that's why everyone's talking about it.

Collect your Crypt isn't actually the biggest tokenized card platform. That's Courtyard. A colleague of mine, he is going on Courtyard and he's bought Pokemon cards there himself. I haven't used those just because I spent a lot of my time in the Solana universe and not as much in the Ethereum and Polygon worlds. But from my understanding, I'm not so concerned from one platform to the other as much as what the technology and what the solution can bring to the market. Because this is, with the trading cards, it's a physical medium and the question that

I have as a research analyst is what can crypto, if anything, do to make it more efficient to actually improve upon the experience in a way that traders can't have when they're just in the physical world. And I think that basically representing these assets with NFTs, allowing for the easy transfer between people, and very importantly, allowing for them to ultimately, if they so choose, withdraw the NFT, which is to say actually take physical custody of the asset is very important, because the whole reason why these things have any value is, well, you know, someone thinks that someone else will think it will be valuable, and that's why they'll speculate on it.

But as I learned from talking to my friend last night, who deals purely in the physical world, there are so many Pokemon card collectors out there who genuinely like the art and they're willing to pay a premium for, they still want to have it physically. What the tokenization allows is a more efficient way for the cards to trade in the interim. So let's talk about this token cards.

You know, yesterday you tweeted that it's up 10 times, less than a week after launch. I think now it's more like eight times. But, you know, you said traders are rushing to price and revenue generating potential. And then you said it's signaling annualized revenue of $38 million. Talk a little bit about like how you're doing that math. Yeah. So I was referencing some Dune dashboards there just to understand the dynamics of collector cards, of collector crypts.

at the moment. The revenue is separate, of course, from the token. And it's worth noting, like, at the moment, the revenue isn't being used to do anything with the token. That's a little different from Pump Fund, I think, is the most notable market participant that all, I think all of the revenue generated on Pump Fund from a meme coin launches is currently being used

to buy back the token, which is a way for the platform to say, okay, look, we are creating value and we are returning that value to the token. And the buy pressure for Pump Fund conceivably will support the price. As far as I know, that isn't currently happening with collector crypt. I think that the reason why the token is jumping so much is because people believe that, well, this Pokemon card movement, fad, whatever you want to call it, it's got legs and the value that's being generated from the revenue on the platform is going to return back to the

token. to be well positioned to capture that now, as opposed to later when it's actually announced if they decide to do that. So you might have heard when, you know, toward the end of my interview with Twamhi, mentioned things like, oh, in the future, there could be even like a cards ETF and stuff like that.

You work at bit wise. You know, it's all about the mashup between like crypto value and Tradfi. So I was curious like, you know, know, what you thought of kind of the potential for that? Like, is that something you see as realistic? Well, I don't know anything about if we're doing any crypto, any NFT, ETS. Well, we have a private NFT fund. That's a completely separate discussion. But with regards to Pokemon ETFs, I don't think there are any plans at the moment or anytime soon. I do think that, you know,

I don't know if these products are perfect for ETFs. I do think that one of the more interesting projects out there is Charzart Capital. It's kind of a joky situation, but this is a project that issues a token and it uses its funds to buy Charzard cards, like the one that I have here. And I guess the token accrues value just by virtue of having exposure to the asset. I'm not an investor. I wouldn't recommend one to do so, do your own research. But these concepts of how can we bring, how can we make these assets,

how can we make these assets accessible to markets that weren't used to them before? Ultimately, crypto allows for that in huge ways. Huh. Okay. And I don't know if I fully understood that. So you're saying that like, um, uh, the, So what did you say about the Charzard? You said like basically...

Okay. Yeah, yeah. So look, it's a very small project. I don't know who's running it. I just saw it on Twitter. It's a... Oh, okay. I wouldn't put too much... I don't have any reason to doubt them.

I don't have any reason to support them. I just think that it's an interesting thing. They have a token. But it's like they have something physical and then they're... Well, so the project called Charzer Capital, they go out. They purchase physical Charzark cards, right? And they have to... custody of it and the these cards are worth sometimes tens of thousands of

dollars because this is one of the most famous Pokemon monsters and the the fact that they collect these cards conceivably will accrue value back to the token so it's just another moment where you see crypto experimenting and giving access to an investment that didn't have such exposure before okay So I just want to ask you about how you wrapped up your tweet thread where you talked about how you feel like this particular, you know, fat that is booming right now in crypto that you think it'll be sticky. And you said you think it'll be one of those moments where this only in crypto innovation breaks into the mainstream. So like talk about like what you think that's going to look like because, yeah, I mean, if for you as like a baseball card collector, do you feel?

like suddenly there will be a lot more liquidity and activity and baseball card trading. Like, yeah, I'd just be interested to hear kind of how you see this going mainstream. Yeah. So I think that it's important to make the distinction between the technology and the asset at hand. Pokemon cards have traded. It's not the first time that there's been a lot of excitement around trading Pokemon cards during the COVID pandemic, especially. That was one moment where there was a lot of hype and the prices were really volatile. So I don't necessarily think that my Charzards are going up forever. I do think, however, that the technology that's allowing more people to trade these assets more

quickly is going to stick. Even beyond this one moment, we are going to see more projects that are bringing assets on chain, more retail-facing projects that really are able to speak. to huge audiences using technologies like tokenization of real world assets to increase the exposure. Okay. All right. Well, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you think listeners should know about this phenomenon? No, I think it's just, I think that the one big idea that's really important here that everyone should keep in mind is that there are just so many new possibilities when you bring physical assets on chain.

And first of all, there's liquidity opportunities, there's access to new groups that might not have had exposure before, but also there are new ways to actually utilize the asset. So not just through buying and selling it and speculating on it, but actually getting some value out of it while not losing it, which is to say using it as collateral and lending, right? We don't really have a huge collateralized Pokemon card loan market right now, but I can only, I believe that we're

going to be heading in that direction. And all of that's possible because we have this topization technology and because we have companies that are doing the work of breaking these assets on chain, creating the digital representation, and facilitating the trading of them. And just to understand that, are you saying this will be like C-Fi lending or could it even be defy lending?

But I don't see how that works because there's a custody aspect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that. that will, well, there already, I was looking into this before, there are services out there that allow people to send in their cards and to take out loans against them. But it's an inefficient process and what I think we will see with, as we see more retail facing assets to come on chain and become tokenized, yeah, I'm sure that we'll see, first of all, DFI projects allow for loans to be taken out against these assets.

and then maybe as well, C-Fi as well, because when you have them in a digital world in a standardized form, it just becomes a lot easier to utilize these assets. Huh. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess like if one of the custody places like gets hacked and a bunch gets stolen or whatever, then. Well, that's, that's, so there's two things there, right? because the cards themselves have to be kept in physical custody somewhere, right? For collector crypt, I think you have to send it to Oregon, and there's some vault in Oregon that they keep everything in.

So there's the risk, of course, that you have to ensure that you believe that this is a good partner, right? You can't just be that anyone is launching a totalization platform, and we just hope that they're keeping good, safe control of the assets. We really need to understand that they have good controls in place. In a much bigger sense than an exchange where you could keep your air-gapped Bitcoin safe and offline, well, if you have physical cards, you need to make sure that they are physically safe. So that's one thing. As well, the custody of the assets, the NFTs, which really act as depository receipts,

you know for myself I keep my Pokemon cards in my digital wallet and I take steps to ensure that they are that the digital wallet is safe and so everyone else who's doing that must do so as well but there's not too much of a risk of the custody the custody agents getting hacked it's more making sure that no fire can get to these assets or floods or or robberies I guess as well Okay, well, we'll have to see all the permutations that this phenomenon takes shape in. All right, Danny, well, it's been such a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Thank you.

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crypto recap. This Monday marked the trading debut of World Liberty Financial's WLFI token, the centerpiece of the Trump family's crypto ventures. The token initially surged above 30 cents, before sliding throughout the day. By Thursday afternoon, WLFI was priced at 16 cents. The launch unlocked 24.6 billion tokens, giving the Trump family and affiliated entities an estimated $5 billion in paper wealth. Data shows insiders control more than half the supply

with one entity holding 22.5 billion WLFI. Donald Trump Jr. defended the project, calling WLFI the governance backbone of a real ecosystem, changing how much, money moves. The tokens debut drew nearly $1 billion in trading volume within its first hour across major exchanges. On Thursday, World Liberty Financial froze Justin Sun's wallet, containing 595 million WLFI tokens worth about $107 million after blockchain data showed $9 million in transfers, sparking a 20% daily price drop and leaving the Trump-linked project down 42% since its September

one debut, despite Sun holding nearly $700 million invested tokens, from there we turn to Washington, where a high-profile platform has just received regulatory clearance to return to U.S. markets. Prediction Market platform, Polymarket, has received regulatory clearance to return to the U.S., following a no-action letter from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The decision allows Polymarket to legally offer event-based contracts through its acquisition of QCX, a licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse. Polly Market has been given the green light to go live in the USA by the CFTC,

CEO Shane Coplin wrote on X, crediting the commission for moving in record timing. The approval comes after years of regulatory scrutiny. In 2022, Polly Market reached a settlement with the CFTC for operating as an unregistered platform, and last year, Copland's home was raided by the FBI. Both the CFTC and the Department of Justice closed their investigations. in July without filing charges. Staying with regulators, America's two top market watchdogs also issued fresh guidance this week.

US regulators have issued long-awaited clarity on spot crypto markets, confirming that registered exchanges may now list certain digital asset products. In a joint statement, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said securities exchanges, designated contract markets, and foreign boards of trade can facilitate spot trading, including products with margin, or leverage if they meet investor protection and transparency standards. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said,

Market participants should have the freedom to choose where they trade, spot crypto assets. Acting CFTC Chair. Caroline Fom called the move the latest demonstration of our mutual objective of supporting growth and development in these markets. The agencies also directed platforms to work closely with custodians, provide clear reference pricing and publicly share trade data. The guidance arrives as Congress continues debating a broader market structure bill, leaving regulators to act under existing law.

Another major theme this week was tokenization, with new developments spanning regulators and private firms. The U.S. Federal Reserve is preparing to spotlight tokenization at its Payments Innovation Conference on October 21st. The event will examine stablecoin models, on-chain assets, and the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance. I look forward to examining the opportunities and challenges of new technologies, said Fed Governor Christopher Waller, noting the role of tokenization in building safer and more efficient payment systems.

Meanwhile, Galaxy Digital has become the first NASDAQ listed company to tokenize its SEC registered public equity directly on a major blockchain. Partnering with SuperState, Galaxy shares are now available on Solana, with legal ownership updated in real time as tokens change hands. CEO Mike Novogratz said the initiative, brings the best of crypto, transparency, programmability, and composability into the traditional world. Adding to the momentum, Ondo Finance has launched over 100 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs on Ethereum,

with plans to expand to 1,000 assets by year end, providing global investors 24-7 on-chain access to equities. In other news, creators are seeing an immediate payout from changes at a popular Salana platform. Salana-based token launchpad. Pump. Dot Fun has introduced a new dynamic fee model under its Project Ascend framework, immediately boosting earnings for token creators. The system links fees to token market capitalization, granting smaller projects up to 0.95% of each trade,

compared with just 0.05% under the previous model. The change had a swift impact. Within 24 hours of the update, creators received nearly $2 million in rewards, compared with only $198,000 the day before. Streamers and token builders say the overhaul could rival traditional platforms like Twitch. It allows small creators like myself to make more money a month than a Twitch or kick streamer does in a year. One pump-dot fun live streamer Jytle told DeCript. Turning to Wall Street, one of Crypto's best-known exchanges

is aiming for a public listing. Crypto Exchange Gemini, founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, has filed for a NASDAQ listing under the ticker symbol, GEMI. The company plans to offer 16.7 million shares at $17 to $19 each, seeking to raise up to $317 million and secure evaluation as high as $2.22 billion. According to the filing, Gemini reported a net loss of $282.5 million, on $68.6 million in revenue for the six months ending June 30th, compared with a $41.4 million loss on $74.3 million in revenue during the same period a year earlier.

The New York-based platform registered as an emerging growth company, which allows it to adopt lighter reporting requirements, including reduced disclosures on executive pay and exemption from certain audit rules. Gemini's filing comes amid renewed enthusiasm for digital asset firms on Wall Street. following successful debuts by Bullish and Circle earlier this year. If approved, Gemini would become the third U.S. listed crypto exchange, joining Coinbase and Bullish. Meanwhile, stablecoins continue to take center stage with a new network designed for payments. Crypto infrastructure provider Fireblocks has launched a new platform designed to streamline how companies move and build with Stable Coins.

The initiative, called the Fireblocks Network for Payments, connects more than 40 participants at launch, including stablecoin issuer Circle, FinTech startup ZeroHash, and Bridge, a company recently acquired by Stripe. The goal is to make cross-border transfers and stable coin integrations faster and less error-prone. Michael Shalov, Fireblocks co-founder and CEO, told Fortune, either it's super expensive from an engineering standpoint and takes them a lot of time, or if they're starting to do it manually, then of course it's basically prone to errors so they can lose money. Fireblocks already processes billions in stablecoin transactions daily,

hitting a record $212 billion in July. The new network expands beyond trading use cases, offering multi-stablecoin support and positioning itself as a rival to Circle's payment system at a time when stablecoins are gaining traction across FinTech and banking. In related news, on Thursday, Stripe and Paradigm unveiled a payments first blockchain called Tempo, now in private testnet with partners like OpenAI, Deutsche Bank, and Shopify, marking Stripe's latest crypto push after its $1.1 billion bridge acquisition and Coinbase base integration.

On the infrastructure side, a major blockchain approved a sweeping upgrade. Solana has voted overwhelmingly in favor of its Alpenglow upgrade, a consensus overhaul designed to multiply network throughput and slash transaction times. More than 98% of stakers back to the mass. measure, easily clearing the 33% quorum requirement after a two-week governance process involving over half of validators. Alpenglo introduces two new components, Voter, which reduces transaction finality from more than 12 seconds to as little as 150 milliseconds, and rotor, which replaces Solana's proof-of-history

system to accelerate data transfers between validators. Together, the changes are expected to increase throughput by about 100-fold. At these speeds, Solana could realize Web 2 level responsiveness with L1 finality, unlocking new use cases that require both speed and cryptographic certainty, the Solana Foundation said in a blog post. Developers and community members describe the leap as a dramatic step forward for the network's infrastructure, with implementation now set to proceed. Ethereum also made headlines this week with a move that stirred community debate.

The Ethereum Foundation has announced plans to sell 10,000 Ether, valued at roughly $43 million through centralized exchanges over the coming weeks. The organization said proceeds will support research and development, ecosystem grants, and donations. To avoid market disruption, sales will be split into smaller orders rather than a single transaction. The move has stirred debate within the crypto community. Some questioned why the foundation chose centralized exchanges instead of decentralized platforms or over-the-counter deals. One user on X described it as, The Most Polite Way I've seen someone dump on us ever.

The sale follows the Foundation's new Treasury policy introduced in June and comes as ether trades above $4,300 after a strong 30-day rally. Elsewhere, Cracken expanded its reach with a new acquisition. Crypto Exchange Cracken has acquired breakout, a proprietary trading platform that funds traders based on demonstrated performance. The deal brings breakout's evaluation-based model directly into Cracken Pro, giving qualified users access to up to $200,000 in notional capital,

and the ability to keep up to 90% of profits. To qualify, traders must purchase and pass an evaluation that tests risk management, drawdown discipline, and strategy consistency. Breakout accounts are capped at $100,000 each, with multiple accounts permitted up to the $200,000 aggregate limit. Breakout gives us a way to allocate capital based on proof of skill rather than access to capital itself, said Cracken co-CEO Arjun Sethi. Breakout CEO Alex Miningham called the integration a unified ecosystem

for trader development and capital deployment. And finally, two platforms face disruptions but with different outcomes. Venus Protocol, a lending platform on B&B chain, suffered an exploit on Tuesday when attackers redirected its core pool Comptroller contract to a malicious address. The breach drained about $27 million in assets, prompting Venus to suspend withdrawals and liquidations while this situation was investigated. On Wednesday, the platform confirmed it had recovered the stolen funds and restored services, assuring users that its front end and custody systems were uncompromised. The pause was necessary not just to secure the fished funds, but to conduct

full security checks, Venus wrote on X. In related news, Ethereum Layer 2, Starknet, suffered a multi-hour outage on Tuesday that erased about an hour of activity before developers reorganized the chain and restored block production, with a full incident report still pending. And that's all. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Oranovich, Margaret Curia, and Pam Majumdhar. The weekly recap was written by Juan Aranovitch and edited by Stephen Erlich.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.