A Pokémon trading card sold for a record-breaking $16.5 million, a testament to the synergy between TCG and Web3.

Author: Kathy.xyz

In February 2026, Logan Paul auctioned off a Pokémon card for $16.5 million.

Only 41 of these "Pikachu Illustrator" cards exist worldwide, and the one owned by Logan Paul is the only one to receive a perfect 10/10 score from the PSA. He bought it for $5.3 million in 2022, and four years later, its value more than tripled, making him a profit of over $11 million.

The things that kids used to save up their pocket money to buy back then have now become financial assets worth eight figures in US dollars.

Where did this business come from, and how big is it?

In 1993, mathematics PhD Richard Garfield combined the collecting mechanism of baseball cards with board game strategy to create Magic: The Gathering.

The logic is simple: random card packs → different rarity → generate exchange value → create demand for collecting → drive up the secondary market.

This underlying mechanism has remained unchanged for thirty years.

The current size of the three major brands:

• Pokémon TCG sales are approximately $2 billion annually, with a cumulative total of over 75 billion copies sold.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! followed closely behind, with approximately 1.99 billion yen;
• Magic: The Gathering has approximately 1.08 billion players and over 50 million players worldwide.

These three brands alone are worth over $5 billion.

The sports cards are even more impressive. The PSA 10-level All-Star Rookie Card has an average annualized return of approximately 18.3% in 2024, outperforming major stock indices.

The entire TCG market was valued at approximately US$6.6-8.4 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to US$16.9 billion by 2035.

The rules you must understand to succeed in this market

The value of a card isn't something you can just decide—it needs to be backed by a rating agency.

PSA is the most authoritative, with a perfect score of 10. The same card can have a price difference of several times, even dozens of times, between a PSA 10 and a PSA 9. The reason Logan Paul's Pikachu card sold for 16.5 million was primarily due to its PSA 10 rating.

Scarcity itself is a design element. Take Pokémon as an example: rarity increases in stages, with full-art cards featuring Special Illustration Rare designs being the most sought-after in recent years. The highest premium is generated by a combination of craftsmanship scarcity, grading certification, and IP popularity.

The card market also has cycles.

The period from 2002 to 2015 was a "dormant period" for the Pokémon trading card market. After the first wave of Pokémon fever (1999-2001), the market cooled down significantly, and many people sold off their childhood collections of cards at low prices, resulting in a large number of high-quality first-edition cards flooding the second-hand market at extremely low prices. This period is the source of many of today's top-tier auction items.

Prior to 2018, the sports trading card market was relatively low. It wasn't until the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home orders in 2020, coupled with the stay-at-home economy, abundant liquidity, and a wave of nostalgia among millennials, that an epic bull market was triggered. 2020-2021 marked the peak price period for the entire trading card market.

2020-2021 saw the price peak: the stay-at-home economy, abundant liquidity, and millennial nostalgia fueled an epic bull market. Interest rate hikes in 2022 led to an overall correction. Starting in 2025, with the Pokémon 30th anniversary hype and a return to liquidity, the market will become active again. The pattern is clear: every bear market presents an opportunity to acquire high-quality, rare Pokémon cards.

Web3 has arrived, what has it brought?

Blockchain has not changed the nature of cards, but it has changed the way they are distributed.

On-chain NFT cards belong to your wallet and can be taken even if the platform shuts down. Traditional physical card transactions take five days to settle, while on-chain transactions are completed in five seconds. High-value cards can also be held in smaller increments, staked, and used for lending.

The most popular approach is to tokenize physical cards (RWA).

@Courtyard_io is the largest on-chain card marketplace, partnering to store physical cards, with over 500,000 collectibles already on-chain. Monthly sales grew from $50,000 in January 2024 to $80 million in August 2025—a 1600-fold increase in 18 months. In July 2025, it completed a $30 million Series A funding round, with Y Combinator participating.

Collector Crypt, deployed on Solana, is projected to have a cumulative trading volume exceeding $150 million by 2025. The $CARDS token saw its FDV surge from $67 million to over $600 million within a week of its launch.

The entire tokenized Pokémon card market saw a transaction volume of $124.5 million in August 2025 alone.

From the time Garfield designed Magic: The Gathering in 1993 to the time a single card sold for $16.5 million in 2026, only thirty years passed.

The core of this business has never changed: scarcity + collectability + exchange value.

What has changed is the scale and the technology that supports it.

That bag of cards you bought with your allowance when you were a child might really be the best asset you ever acquired.

I compared the traditional online integrated trading market with the RWA trading market and found that putting assets and transaction processes on the blockchain does indeed improve transaction efficiency.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the trading volume and revenue of @courtyard_io and @Collector_Crypt have been steadily increasing. This suggests that their businesses do not rely solely on crypto speculators who prioritize trading.

Currently, the only on-chain TCG tokens are $CARDS and $BIRB, which we should keep an eye on. Collector Crypt is overly concentrated in terms of both active users and the $CARDS token structure, with a significant number of investors holding locked-in tokens; we recommend continuing to observe in the short term.