- Card-pack purchases on on-chain TCG platforms climbed to a record $324.6 million in June for a fourth straight month, underscoring how quickly the market is growing.
- Solana-based Collector Crypt remained the leader with about 65% market share, while Turbo mode accounted for 71.8% of activity, showing a trading structure centered on instant buybacks.
- Risks tied to custodian bankruptcy or damage, along with blind-box regulation, have emerged as custody risks and gambling-related concerns, and the report said lasting growth will require broader collector participation and a deeper secondary peer-to-peer market.
Forecast Trend Report by Period
The market for “on-chain TCG” is growing rapidly as physical trading card game cards such as Pokemon, One Piece and Yu-Gi-Oh! are bought and sold on blockchains like crypto assets. By cutting the time needed for grading, storage, shipping and settlement, the model is attracting both collectors and crypto traders while lowering barriers to cross-border transactions.
Card-pack purchases on on-chain TCG platforms rose 34% from a month earlier to $324.6 million in June, according to Blockworks data. That marked a record for a fourth straight month. The total was about double the March level. Purchases fell to about $270 million in July, but monthly trading volume still remained near $300 million.
Trading Jumps Ahead of Pokemon’s 30th Anniversary, Driven by Instant Buybacks
A typical model stores a physical card in a vault and issues an NFT representing rights to that card. When a user buys a virtual card pack on a platform, one physical card is assigned at random and the corresponding NFT is sent to the buyer’s wallet.
Specialized graders and custodians including PSA, CGC and BGS verify authenticity and condition. Grading results and ownership-transfer records are stored on-chain. Because the card never leaves the vault, users can trade it around the clock without waiting for international shipping. Buyers who want the physical card can surrender or burn the NFT and request delivery.
Growth in on-chain TCG is moving in step with the boom in the physical card market. Collecting demand has revived ahead of the Pokemon TCG’s 30th anniversary this year, and a 30th-anniversary expansion pack is scheduled for a simultaneous global release on Sept. 16. It will be the first time a Pokemon TCG expansion launches worldwide on the same day. Weekly sales on tokenized Pokemon card platforms rose 337% from a year earlier to $7.4 million in the first week of May. Google search interest for Pokemon cards has also approached a record high.
Easier access to region-specific products is another draw. Promotional cards and packages released first in certain countries or sold in limited quantities previously required collectors to travel, use proxy buyers or wait for overseas shipping. On-chain platforms store locally sourced cards and unopened packages in vaults, tokenize them and sell them to overseas collectors. Buyers can trade rights to those items without taking immediate physical delivery.
The ability to turn cards into cash immediately without going through grading and shipping is also drawing investment demand. Physical card trades typically require finding a buyer, collecting payment, packaging the item, arranging insurance and completing international shipping. On-chain platforms transfer only the NFT, without moving the card itself, cutting both time and transaction costs.
The Block wrote that the on-chain card market tends to follow gains in the physical card market with a lag. Crypto capital is moving into tokenized cards on expectations of rising card prices and platform rewards. Adam Hollander, chief marketing officer at OpenSea, said tokenized Pokemon cards could become the NFT market’s next growth driver.
Collector Crypt Leads as Rivals Gain Ground
The market leader is Solana-based Collector Crypt. Card-pack purchases on the platform totaled $209.5 million in June, accounting for about 65% of the market. That fell to $156.7 million in July, though the platform still held the top spot with about 58% market share. The Solana Foundation says more than 130,000 tokenized cards have been listed on Collector Crypt and cumulative transaction volume has exceeded $1.6 billion.
A major driver of Collector Crypt’s growth is an instant buyback feature known as Turbo. If users pull a card they do not want, the platform buys it back immediately for 85% to 93% of its appraised value. Users can use the proceeds to buy another card pack. The feature appears to have attracted crypto traders looking for quick turnover because it lets them recycle capital without shipping the card or placing a separate sell order.
Newer rivals are also gaining traction. Polygon-based Courtyard posted $85.3 million in trading volume in July. It has been building market share by charging no peer-to-peer trading fees and expanding beyond cards into comic books and coins.
Phygitals has tried to differentiate itself by linking professionally graded physical cards one-to-one with NFTs. A separate Solana lending protocol, MLKY, has launched a service that lets users borrow the stablecoin USDC against tokenized cards from Collector Crypt and Phygitals. The market is expanding beyond simple buying and selling into financial services that use collectibles as collateral.
Chance Studio, backed by Web3 venture capital firm Hashed, has combined card trading with collection-sharing and community features. In Hong Kong, listed company MemeStrategy has set up a fund backed by top-graded Pokemon cards certified by PSA.
Traditional finance firms are also moving into the TCG market directly. Global asset manager VanEck this month launched 12,000 limited-edition sets of Market Fours TCG, a physical card game built around investing concepts. Earlier, affiliate SegMint introduced Synked Collect, an app that tracks prices and holdings for TCG cards including Pokemon, One Piece and Magic: The Gathering and connects users for trading. SegMint is also developing infrastructure for tokenization, authenticity verification and trading of physical collectibles.
Most Trading Is Instant Buybacks as Custody Risks Linger
The market’s rapid growth has also drawn criticism that activity is still skewed toward randomized pack opening rather than pure collecting. Blockchain research firm Popilus found that 71.8% of June card-pack purchases on Collector Crypt came through Turbo mode.
The value of cards that users actually had shipped to them amounted to just 2.4% to 3.1% of total card-pack purchases. Peer-to-peer trading accounted for less than 1%. That suggests a large share of the market consists of users reselling cards back to the platform immediately after pulling them and buying new packs, rather than holding them long term or selling them to other collectors.
Custody risk remains another challenge. If a company storing physical cards goes bankrupt, or if cards are damaged or lost, the delivery right tied to the NFT and the card’s value could be impaired. Critics say custodians’ insurance coverage, card inventory disclosures and the legal relationship between NFTs and the underlying physical assets need to be clarified.
Regulation of randomized sales is another variable. The Singapore government plans to include TCG products in blind-box rules it is preparing this year to reduce gambling risks. Because on-chain card packs allow buyers to cash out results immediately, regulators may judge them to carry a stronger gambling element than ordinary physical card packs.
Ponyo, a researcher at Popilus, wrote in a report that a shallow peer-to-peer secondary market shows the current ecosystem still depends heavily on randomized card packs rather than a collector economy. For the market to keep growing, real collector participation and peer-to-peer trading both need to expand.