The Pokémon card platform Collector sells 4 cards per second, generating millions in revenue. Researchers praise it: the product market fit of NFT!

Analyzing the Collector mechanism, handling everything from verification to card preservation.

Collector Crypt is an NFT trading platform that combines RWA ( real-world assets ). The official Collector collects cards from platforms around the world like ( eBay ) and sends the physical cards to the renowned card verification organization PSA for inspection. The physical items are stored in Collector's vault and are then tokenized on-chain as NFTs on Solana. When the NFTs are traded, the new holders can choose to hold, resell, or redeem the physical items from Collector using the NFTs, and the physical cards will be sent to the holders.

( New hotspot for collectibles on-chain! Bitwise: The Pokémon card trading platform is迎 coming to the "Polymarket moment" )

The Collector repurchase plan creates a win-win situation, and online gacha stimulates dopamine.

But the key to making money on the Collector platform lies in the GACHA online card draw. The Collector's gacha packs are priced at 50 USDC and 250 USDCS. The Pokémon cards drawn at 50 USDC are divided into four levels:

Common: $30~$60, 80% probability.

Uncommon: $60~$110, 15% chance.

Rare: $110~$250, 4% chance.

Epic: $250~$2000, 1% chance.

The Pokémon card for 250 USDC per draw is:

Uncommon: $150~$250, 75% probability.

Rare: $250~$400, 20% chance.

Epic: 400 – 2000, 4% chance.

Legend: Over $2,000~10,000, 1% chance.

People who often play blind boxes, capsule toys, or card draws definitely encounter situations where the lottery results do not meet their expectations. Collector's solution is that players can choose to sell back to Collector at 85% of the (250 USDC version for 90% of the market price of ).

For example, if you spend 50 USDC to draw a card worth 40 USDC, and if you don't like that card, the Collector is willing to buy it back for 85% of the market price (32 USDC). For the platform, this means a profit of 18 USDC. For the player, even though they lost money, they don't have to worry about their funds being stuck in an unwanted item, which creates a win-win mechanism.

If customers have a positive expectation of drawing cards, can the platform still make money?

One of the keys to Collector's success is liquidity. In August, the platform purchased over $500,000 worth of Pokémon cards and anticipates spending over $5 million on card purchases in September. CEO Tuomas Holmberg stated in an interview that Collector is the world's only lottery with a positive expected value, where an average investment of 50 USDC can yield 55 USDC. Collector allows customers to maintain a positive expected value while the platform can still achieve sustainable profits by utilizing inventory cycles rather than exploiting casino advantages to extract value.

We further break down the buyback strategy. If the expected value of the card is 55 USDC and calculated at a 85% discount, it can be bought back at a price of 46.75 USDC. After deducting the cost of free card draws, the average burden per card pack is 0.75 USD. Based on this calculation, if players choose to buy back, the Collector can earn 2.5 USD per draw. For card packs that do not opt for buyback, calculated at a 4% fee rate, the Collector can earn 2 USD per draw.

Researcher: Collector has a technical moat.

Researcher Kyle believes that with the explosive growth of TCG games like Collector, a gold rush in related fields will also emerge, but it is not a product that can be easily replicated. The market value of the card collectibles market reached 7.43 billion USD in 2024, and it is expected to continue growing at a compound annual growth rate of 7.86%. He believes that Collector's business model: verifying cards, storing them in a vault, and trading in the most convenient tokenized way, is precisely the PMF ( product-market fit of NFTs ).

One of the key moats of the team is its monitoring auction system, which has developed the world's first end-to-end eBay scraping auction tool that monitors thousands of auctions daily, using proprietary pricing algorithms, and simultaneously bids on hundreds to thousands of cards. They purchase cards worth $500,000 weekly, making them one of the largest card buyers on eBay. At the same time, the identity of this big buyer has also helped them build good connections, including authentication agencies like PSA.

Online Pokémon card NFTs generate millions in revenue, selling 4 packs per second.

@zkayAPE indicates that Collector's latest gacha sold about 14,000 packs of $50 gacha packs within just 1 hour, amounting to $700,000 worth of (, which corresponds to selling 233 packs of ) per minute and 4 packs of ( per second. DeFiLlama shows that Collector's revenue is $8 million, however, @zkayAPE's data suggests they have earned $12.45 million in revenue.

In the future, Collector also plans to venture into professional sports player cards, including basketball and baseball, which are the largest card collectibles in the global market. Additionally, the trendy toy market, such as Labubu, is also part of Collector's plan, and they have already partnered with the Solana NFT project Moonbird.

Collector Crypt announced its seed round financing information back in February 2023, with investors including GSR, Big Brain Holdings, GBV Capital, Telos, Master Ventures, FunFair Ventures, and StarLaunch, and it will issue tokens on August 27, 2025.

Phygitals, with its variable pricing, has a market share exceeding that of Collector.

Another competitor is Phygitals, which also allows cards to be sent to the Phygitals vault. After verification, an NFT representing the card will be mapped onto the chain, and holders can choose to keep it as a collectible, trade it, or list it for sale. All rated cards are stored in advanced custodial facilities and are protected by strict bank-grade security. Rated cards are kept in climate-controlled, fully insured facilities, equipped with 24/7 security monitoring to ensure their long-term safety. NFT holders can also choose to redeem cards, with a maximum of 50 cards per order.

One of the reasons why Phygitals can rise to prominence is its highly competitive rates and lower entry prices. The minimum price for a Collector draw is 50 USD, while Phygitals range from 1 to 250 USD. In the past week, Phygitals' market share was 34%, even surpassing Collector's 30%. It is worth noting that they have not yet issued any tokens.

This article discusses the Pokémon card platform Collector, which sells 4 cards per second, generating millions in revenue. Researchers praise it as a market fit for NFT products! It first appeared in Chain News ABMedia.