Written by: Cookie, BlockBeats
While crypto players are focused on the health rumors surrounding Trump and waiting for possible trading opportunities, a token called $CARDS has attracted attention by surging nearly 10 times from September 2 to its peak, with its market cap once surpassing 400 million USD.
$CARDS is the token of Collector Crypt, a physical Pokémon card trading platform on Solana. In February 2023, Collector Crypt announced the completion of its seed round financing, with the specific amount undisclosed. Investors included GSR, Big Brain Holdings, FunFair Ventures, Genesis Block Ventures, Master Ventures Investment Management, StarLaunch, and Telos.
In addition, out of the 20% of tokens allocated to the community, 2.5% are available for claiming at the same time. According to the official tokenomics, if the tokens held by the project team are not counted in the initial circulation (the team claims there are currently no plans to sell), the current circulating supply of $CARDS is about 212 million tokens.
At market price, the tokens unlocked at TGE for pre-seed, seed, and advisors are currently worth about 1.67 million USD
The official team stated there are currently no plans to sell tokens
In fact, if we look at what the project itself is doing, the on-chain trading of Pokémon cards by Collector Crypt is not that innovative.
Courtyard.io on Polygon has also been operating for more than two years. Last month, Courtyard’s monthly sales reached a new high of about 78.43 million USD. Since February this year, Courtyard’s monthly sales have all exceeded 40 million USD.
This rapid growth this year may be the reason Courtyard secured large-scale financing. On July 28, according to Fortune, Courtyard completed a 30 million USD Series A round led by Forerunner Ventures, with existing investors such as NEA and Y Combinator also participating.
In August 2023, when Courtyard had just attracted the attention of a few NFT players, we reported on Courtyard. At that time, some NFT players had already obtained Pokémon cards through Courtyard and used them for on-chain collateralized lending.
Besides Collector Crypt and Courtyard, other crypto projects doing similar business include Beezie, Drip, Emporium, and phygitals.
However, Collector Crypt is the only one among these projects that has issued a token, giving $CARDS a first-mover advantage. Of course, Collector Crypt itself is also quite strong; last month, its monthly trading volume reached about 44 million USD, not too far behind Courtyard.
You might wonder, is there really that much genuine demand for trading Pokémon cards on-chain?
The answer is no. For both Collector Crypt and Courtyard, their actual revenue-generating business is the gambling-style “blind box” draws.
The image above shows Collector Crypt’s Pokémon card gashapon system. For about 60 USD, there’s an 80% chance of drawing a card worth 30 to 60 USD, a 15% chance of drawing a card worth 60 to 110 USD, a 4% chance of drawing a card worth 110 to 250 USD, and a 1% chance of drawing a card worth 250 to 2000 USD.
What if you draw a bad card? No problem, you can sell it back to Collector Crypt at an 85% discount and keep drawing.
This lottery system by Collector Crypt officially launched in January this year, achieving about 2 million USD in sales that month. By March, monthly sales had grown to 12.55 million USD, in May to 22.31 million USD, and last month it reached 43.89 million USD. Meanwhile, last month, the transaction volume in Collector Crypt’s card trading marketplace was only about 120,000 USD.
On Collector Crypt’s monthly total sales bar chart, the share from the card trading marketplace is almost invisible
Although there is no direct data on lottery revenue, we can get a sense of how profitable the lottery business is from a previous Courtyard interview. In an interview with Fortune last month, Courtyard revealed that it buys back lottery cards from customers at 90% of their value, then resells them as new lottery packs to customers to make money. The same card is sold an average of 8 times per month on the platform.
Even so, it’s still hard to say that the surge in $CARDS is a market-driven “price discovery.” Because after the presale ended and until two days ago, $CARDS’ price remained sluggish, and presale participants even felt like they had “lost again.”
But the involvement of “leaders” pow and gake greatly changed the price trend. After both tweeted their support for $CARDS, everyone started to believe.
At this point, we can summarize $CARDS as follows:
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The business narrative is not new, but the revenue is quite strong, making it the absolute leader in this sector on Solana.
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The demand is real, but it’s not for Pokémon card trading itself, but rather for the gambling-style “lottery” demand. Other projects in the same sector are similar.
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Other projects in the same sector have not yet issued tokens, so currently there are no competing tokens with the same concept on the market.
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The number of token holders is not large, and the recent price surge is mainly due to “leaders” calling the shots.
There is real substance, but whether $CARDS can maintain its momentum after this emotion-driven surge still needs time to be tested.
