what's going on everybody welcome back to stacking slabs your hobby content alternative i'm brett excited to be here today hopefully you're doing well i am so grateful for you showing up showing out each and every week definitely make sure you tell a damn friend about what we're doing over here the stacking slabs network continues to grow continues to create specific shows for different types of collectors in this space and that is the goal we want to make sure that whatever you collect you have a spot to get educated and inspired and we're just getting started you're starting to see these new concepts and shows roll out and we won't stop i'm dedicated to this i have a ton of passion around content media the hobby and i can't wait to continue to push this forward in today's conversation i wanted to look at the four hundred and eighty one million dollars of cards sold online according to card ladder such a insane number it is a number that i like to show to people not in the hobby who aren't collectors or who are business owners and operators to get them to understand that this space where we spend our time is vibrant it's growing and i think there is a lot of reasons why this is happening what i wanted to do today is reverse engineer the four hundred and eighty one million dollars in a way that kinda allows me to dust off some of my old corporate shoes i saw an opportunity here with this subject matter to kinda step into the world that i once lived in working in technology we would see data we would see different segments of our customer base growing different verticals and i would be asked to explore to investigate to understand why this was happening and that would take me doing research that would take me doing having conversations with members of the sales team that would take me talking to the marketing team about what are we creating collateral what's causing this to happen is it something that's completely outside of our control and nine times out of ten the answer would be there was infrastructure in place there was support in place to allow certain verticals or certain segments to grow and so i really enjoyed that about my previous life i enjoyed that about my my previous professional life to dig into research understanding and try to come up with an answer and try to come up with some evidence to support the reason so that we can then take that information and double down and so that's what i want to do here i want to look at the four eighty one and maybe share some perspective from someone in this space building a business about how we got here i think undeniably card ladder tracks this and this is a big number you've seen it reposted and you've seen it shared across different digital channels as a marketer i love the fact that this industry tab in cardladder can be used to go viral in a way especially when things are going up that is a fun built in feature of cardladder card ladder is obviously a sponsor of the stacking slabs network so we're big fans over here but this is the highest number that's ever recorded but when i look at that number i don't necessarily think about cards and maybe this is because of my previous professional background and maybe how i'm wired but i tend to think about infrastructure because a half a billion dollars does not move through the hobby by accident it moves through systems systems that are built on trust and before we go any further we need to define this number that we're talking about because if we get sloppy with this everything else becomes hobby hype so cardladder's industry view tracks the online secondary market for trading card singles plus product when platforms publish those sales it includes marketplaces and auction houses where transactions are publicly recorded very important note this number does not include anything happening in real life in at the card show scene transactions within hobby shop so forty one is just insane but then you can even think of use your imagination to imagine like all the other commerce that's happening not online or not tracked by card ladder and this number explicitly excludes what i just said but also social media deals i think that's important too to call out so when we say four hundred and eighty one million we're not talking about entire hobby economy we're talking about the portion that is online secondary market publicly recorded and clean enough to track this is important because it means this number isn't just a reflection of collectors buying cards it's a reflection of systems that make those transactions possible and what makes february twenty twenty six interesting isn't just the size of the number it's what it implies about the flow card letter had already recorded massive months before august twenty twenty five four hundred and sixteen million with totals sometimes increasing later in transactions that are verified and recorded at a later date so that's what i've been monitoring is this number going to continue to go up it hasn't but it might change by the time this goes live but this is where it's at as i'm talking with you all right now so this four hundred and eighty one million month didn't come out of nowhere it sits on top of a machine that has already been built and that machine is what i think collectors and operators people who are working in this industry should care about because collectors chase cards but then operators chase margins both of these groups collectors operators both chase trust and trust is the machine and so what i wanna do is reverse engineer this four hundred and eighty one million dollar month not by talking about which player is hot in the market that is roaring and cards going up but by asking a little bit of a different question and that's why i want to come at this from a different angle and the question i'm asking is what had to be true in order for a half a billion dollars to be cleared in one month between strangers on the internet let's start with an important but simple observation here a four hundred and eighty one million dollar month means the market didn't just transact it cleared and clearing is the difference between listings existing and money actually changing hands for a market to clear at that scale i think four things have to be true buyers believe the listings are real enough and worth enough to pay for sellers believe they will actually get paid both sides believe disputes can be resolved and enough data and pricing information exists that people feel comfortable getting by or putting their last bid in those all might sound obvious and that that might see sound simple that's infrastructure and i think understanding that infrastructure exists is super important and you can look on the industry tab where all of the highest volume sellers are coming from three hundred and thirty nine million from ebay which is absolute insanity that's one category for a massive company but a very strong category fifty five mil at golden fanatics collect forty eight million heritage twenty one million alt eighteen million that's not the hobby that's the rails and the real question is not what players' cards sold think the real question is what kinds of rails do these platforms provide that allow these systems to scale and there are things that have happened on the platform level over the course of the last several years that we might not even consider being reasons why this market is so strong but i think this is important and this is the objective because the infrastructure in place is supporting these sales and they're helping solve different trust problems remember i'm gonna keep going back to that north star of trust right the operators are looking for trust buyers and sellers are looking for trust everyone is looking for trust and you have to have the right infrastructure in place so if you zoom out and look at the hobby i'm gonna probably toggle back between both collector and operator i'm sitting in this hybrid position but collectors chase cards and operators build the rails and if you operate in this industry let's say breakers dealers consignment shops marketplaces vaults your job is not actually selling cards and i know that sounds crazy because cards are the product but the way i'm viewing it is your job is moving inventory through a trust pipeline and the hobby is quietly built four layers of infrastructure that make this pipeline possible layer one liquidity venues layer two data and pricing signals layer three identity verification and layer four custody and settlement trust connects all four of those and what i wanna do is walk through them so layer one liquidity venues this is where transactions actually clear we talk about sales sales history sales data all the time but what actually matters is someone that moment we all know this moment right we win a card on ebay and then it takes us to the next screen and we've got our credit card information just already in there and we have to hit confirm or whatever the button says and the wheel spins and then it gives us the congratulation this is clearing this is clearing money out of our bank accounts to the platform the platform is going to take their percentage give the rest to the seller that's really important marketplaces and auction houses ebay functions as a general clearinghouse the broadest buyer base by droves the y widest discovery by a lot then you also have specialized venues you can look at golden for instance right golden runs high end auctions and with extended bidding and buyer premiums designed to concentrate premium assets i can't even say how many conversations i've had from individuals who know that i am building a business in the sports card hobby who were not in the hobby but got back into the hobby because they saw golden show on netflix and i think that's kind of a sidebar but it's interesting to me and more so ingrained in it sometimes we don't really understand what's happening on the the periphery but you just look at golden right if you've got these one of a kind cards that are going to get or wanting to get as much promotion as possible that's where collectors are sending them each venue or each marketplace within this hobby they might all look the same but a lot of them solve different liquidity problems operators route inventory based on that structure and the structure then all cards aren't the same look at low end volume look at mid tier look at high end trophy assets there are different rails for the different inventory glare two and i think maybe is the most important of all this is the data and pricing signal i think about when i was growing up and we got a monthly beckett right i remember when there were becketts for each sport and how different that was and it made me feel like i had assets because i could associate prices with each of those cards that were in my top loaders or in my binder i go back to that time with beckett thinking that i had data and information which i did and i fast forward to now where access to data and information regarding sales is right at my fingertips and it's almost insane the accessibility of data that we have and i think i think platforms like cardladder for providing us signals and without platforms like cardladder i am not confident that we reach that so it's kind of inception in a way cardladder is reporting on this through their data platform but i also think the platform is responsibility because it helps build and develop trust the modern hobby runs on data twenty years ago you just guessed or you were late based on what the bay beckett said now pricing is on demand you can come track price history view median sales prices see population reports even marketplaces themself are integrating pricing infrastructure i don't know if you've noticed this but i find it to be a handy feature ebay built price guide collection tools that allow users to track portfolio values monitor price changes and list directly from inventory the cardladder index insights into the trading card listings has been very very helpful to help streamline research purchasing decisions that's not a collector feature that is an operator feature wearing a collector costume because when pricing becomes transparent spreads compress volume increases and operators win through volume and efficiency layer three identity verification the slab economy this is the identity layer psa alone has certified more than sixty five million items since ninety one establishing a global standard for card authentication grading accelerated in the in the late nineties when the internet marketplaces like ebay created need for remote trust collectors needed a way to verify a card without holding its hands that's why grading exploded during the internet era it gave identity to cards without the identity layer high dollar liquidity collapses quickly layer four custody and settlement this is a layer i think operators underestimate because physical assets plus high value plus fraud risk means custody has to become professional vaulting has become a major piece of the infrastructure whether you vault or don't like vault vault has become a key piece to allow cards to move from one collector to another collector ebay's integration with the psa vault allows cards to move from authentication directly into storage this is settlement infrastructure and it changes how these assets move here's the uncomfortable truth for many owners and operators you are not in the business of cards you're in the business of trust cards are the payload trust is the network and if you look closely every major platform is building products around trust look at it authentication program vaulting pricing transparency dispute resolution seller reputation systems even cardladder itself spends hours reviewing transactions and filtering out suspicious sales like showbids or realistic items to maintain reliable data this is what engineered trust looks like verification identity custody recourse transparency when trust improves friction drops when friction drops transaction clears when transaction clears liquidity grows and when liquidity grows capital flows into the market that's how you get four hundred and eighty one million dollars in one month when operators get hurt is when trust breaks authenticity disputes altered cards chargebacks bad comps opaque fees inconsistent fulfillment these are annoyances they're not annoyances they're profit leaks the operators who scale understand that they build trust stacks they route inventory based on trust levels they use custody rails when shipping risks are too high they rely on verified transaction data when pricing inventory and they design operations that reduce uncertainty for buyers because uncertainty kills transaction and trust unlocks them so here's the thesis i want operators in this space to sit with the four hundred and eighty one million dollar month is not a headline about demand it's a headline about rails infrastructure systems trust collectors chase cards operators chase margins both chase trust and the businesses that build the strongest trust infrastructure capture the flow that's the story behind the number and that the kind of story we're going to keep telling here because if stacking slabs is going to earn trust for operators in this industry it's not going to happen through hype make believe funny business it's going to happen when we reverse engineer the rails behind the money every single time i think this market is so fascinating i think the infrastructure is fascinating i find the moves that our companies in this space are making are fascinating i like the startups i like the different categories i like content supporting these categories i like the people behind these categories i like so much in this space it is one of the most unique industries i've ever studied and it's just getting started it is just getting started it was wasn't long ago where it was a point of sale or even before a point of sale pen and paper at a hobby shop then moving to a point of sale then you have online infrastructure in place you've got data transparency and tracking all of this stuff is just forming and as that infrastructure forms not only are we going to get big months and big sales and collectors are gonna be happy but it's gonna open the doors it's gonna open the doors for innovation new ideas new technology more jobs more individuals like me who are quitting their corporate lifestyle and jumping all in on the hobby whether it's building their own business or contributing to another one and that is inspiring and i think that rules this is a space where people get sucked in and this is a space that is growing is growing rapidly and everyone just looks at growth on the sales side there's so much more more jobs more companies more cool stuff and i love that and i want to represent that with stacking slap i wanna talk about collectors and the cards that they're they have i wanna tell those stories i wanna talk about the businesses and what they're building and the entrepreneurial spirit of the business owner i wanna zoom out and look at the industry and try to uncover and understand how we got here and that's what i'll continue to do here on stackingslabs i really appreciate the support make sure you hit the follow button tell a damn friend run on over to the patreon group do all the things but enjoy your collecting if you're an operator in this space if you work inside this industry i'd love to hear your thoughts let me know what you think i would love to get that feedback until then we'll be back with another one you take care happy collecting happy building talk to you soon