Pokemon cards became a $15B market - crypto startups want a cut

Pokemon cards have quietly become a multibillion-dollar asset class, and a wave of blockchain startups now wants to trade them like one. CoinDesk reports that the cards are up 28% this year, beating both the S&P 500's 13% and bitcoin's 29% decline over the same stretch.

Estimates of the market's total size vary by source but land in a consistent range: Kovoy VC put it near $13 billion in 2024, Mordor Intelligence projects roughly $15 billion for 2026, and TCGCharts tracks an $10.8 billion market cap across graded cards specifically. eBay alone sold $2.62 billion worth of trading cards in 2025, with $837 million of that in Pokemon and other trading-card-game cards. Retail chains are feeling the demand directly: Target reported a 70% jump in trading card sales and is expanding dedicated shelf space, Walmart's online marketplace saw a 200% increase, and Costco has drawn lines of shoppers as early as 3:30 a.m. for restocks of booster boxes.

Deadstock, built by ATH Labs and based in Abu Dhabi, stores PSA-10 graded cards in secure vaults on the Arbitrum network, matching each physical card to a digital token one-to-one. The startup has a partnership with the Japan Trading Card Center for exclusive inventory access and is backed by Bullish Capital, the venture arm of CoinDesk's parent company.

“We aren't just tokenizing a card, we are tokenizing a lot of cards.”

— Dominic Jang, Founder, Deadstock (ATH Labs)

Other platforms are already generating real trading activity. Courtyard posted roughly $139 million in 30-day volume, translating to about $48 million in annualized fees. Collector-Crypto's smaller $77.8 million in monthly volume nonetheless produces a larger $148.2 million annualized fee figure, and Phygitals runs a smaller operation at $7.4 million in monthly volume. A separate venture, MemeStrategy, has launched what it calls the first tokenized fund built around a single card type, the PSA-10 "Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat."

Liquidity remains the open problem none of these platforms has solved. eBay's scale gives it a network effect that's hard to replicate: buyers go where sellers already are, and rare cards trade infrequently enough that price discovery stays difficult even on the bigger tokenized platforms. The most visible recent trade underscores how thin the top of the market still is: Logan Paul sold a Pikachu Illustrator card for $16.5 million to Solari Capital founder AJ Scaramucci, reportedly clearing more than $8 million in profit on a single card.

• Pokemon card market: $10-15B depending on methodology; up 28% YTD versus the S&P 500's 13% and bitcoin's -29%
• eBay sold $2.62B in trading cards in 2025, including $837M in Pokemon and other TCG cards
• Courtyard: ~$139M in 30-day volume; Collector-Crypto: $148.2M in annualized fees on $77.8M monthly volume
• Japan Trading Card Center posted about 2.4 billion yen in profit over the past year on 6.9 billion yen in total assets

The push mirrors a broader tension already playing out across tokenized collectibles. Blue-chip NFT collections have posted gains even as the wider NFT market keeps shrinking, and the category as a whole is still climbing back from a period when overall NFT trading volume fell 98% from its 2021 peak. Tokenized trading cards inherit the same basic challenge: proving a digital claim on a physical object is worth trusting is easier than building a market deep enough to trade it at a fair price.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.