Why The Pokémon Card Market Is Blowing Up | Andy8052

**David** (0:01)
Andy8052, welcome back to Bankless. We've had you on a bunch. It's been a while. Glad to have you back.

**Andy** (0:06)
It's been a long time. It's been a long time. Yeah, happy to be back.

**David** (0:09)
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 resonate 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?

**Andy** (0:31)
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. I just do 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 Crypto Punks 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. I'm like actually like, 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 NFT is 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, you know, have a full view of the market and participate and, you know, make sure you're getting the best price. And that's still like 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 maybe had more intense hype cycles, but in a lot of ways, very similar.

**David** (2:29)
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.

**Andy** (2:38)
Butterflies.

**David** (2:39)
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?

**Andy** (2:59)
Yeah. 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 is like all the 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 the over about the last year. And I think something that people don't really understand or haven't necessarily thought about the second-order effects 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.

**David** (4:06)
Hundreds of millions of dollars of cards a month, they are redeeming.

**Andy** (4:11)
So they're having hundreds of millions of dollars worth of volume go through their platforms. Okay.

**David** (4:17)
Okay. In aggregate, like the platforms themselves are seeing hundreds of millions of dollars.

**Andy** (4:21)
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. They're 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 buy back rates and you can sell them back.