Tokenized Pokémon Card Sales Soar Over 10x in One Year, CARDS Market Cap Surpasses $580 Million

BlockBeats News, June 15th, according to GMGN data, the Solana ecosystem entity card trading platform Collector Crypt's token CARDS has continued to surge in value, breaking through $580 million from its early May value of $200 million, with a nearly $5.4 million 24-hour trading volume.

The on-chain tokenized Pokémon card market has seen explosive growth, with the top seven platforms achieving a capsule toy sales volume of $230 million in May, compared to just $32 million in the same period last year, representing a growth of over 10 times. The core driver is the capsule toy machine mechanism. Users can invest funds to randomly receive NFT card backs, simulating the physical pack opening experience while providing immediate liquidity.

Collector Crypt founder Tuom Holmberg revealed that the capsule toy machine accounts for 90% to 95% of the company's business, and the platform has accumulated sales of over $1 billion in the 18 months since its launch. To dispel concerns in the market about an "exit scam," the company has a 28,000 square foot vault in Montana to store physical card inventory, with some competitors also accessing this vault to gain liquidity and trust endorsements. Holmberg positions the capsule toy machine as a "gamified shopping experience" and claims that the machine provides positive expected value—on average, users can get back $55 for every $50 spent.

The global physical card market reached $15.8 billion last year, and is expected to increase to $23.5 billion by 2030. Despite the fading NFT craze in the crypto space, tokenization technology is once again becoming a key infrastructure for the speculative card market.