Inside The Vault

In a 2024 Sotheby’s auction that featured seven bidders and lasted 15 minutes, Ken Griffin paid $44.6 million for a Stegosaurus fossil named Apex. That price tag is roughly $1 million more than Griffin paid for his first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution in November 2021.

Last month, five auction houses sold $762 million worth of collector cars during Monterey Car Week, shattering forecasts and totaling more than twice the average of the last 10 years. A 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe sold for $42.9 million; a 1996 McLaren F1 for $34.7 million.

During Masters week, Augusta National generates an estimated $70 million in merchandise sales, about $1 million an hour, at its on-site-only store. Augusta refuses abundance as a business model and instead restricts access, which makes the purchase a part of the pilgrimage.

At last year’s US Open, 738,459 Honey Deuce cocktails were sold. At $23 per drink, this generated nearly $17 million in revenue. There are plenty of places that can make you a vodka lemonade with a bit of raspberry liqueur, but only one where you can get a Honey Deuce™.

At a time when it feels like everything can be vibe coded, duped, or delivered overnight with the click of a button, abundance makes scarcity the flex.

It’s no wonder the world of collectibles is popping off.

Consider some of the action from this year alone. A Shohei Ohtani card fetched $11 million six weeks ago. Logan Paul sold his 1998 Pikachu Illustrator card for $16.5 million at Goldin Auctions earlier this year. And in one of the least-cool moves of all time, Kevin O'Leary showed up to the Actor Awards in March with a one-of-one Kobe and Jordan Dual Logoman card around his neck, set in 2.2 pounds of Tiffany white gold and 100 carats of diamonds. He paid $12.9 million for the card in 2025 and told the red carpet he was now wearing "$20 million."

Before we dig in further, let's get our bearings with a few definitions.

The same scarcity instinct around rare vehicles and dinosaur bones is now being packaged into smaller, more liquid, and increasingly financialized objects like trading cards, comics, and memorabilia.

In 2025, graders processed 26.8 million cards, a 32% YoY increase. Non-sports cards accounted for 16.8 million of them, up 95%. Trading card singles (as opposed to packs) generated $2.62 billion in eBay sales alone, and Whatnot raised $545 million at a $20 billion valuation this summer (side note: Joe Montana invested at pre-seed and hit a dinger with this one).

PSA already dominates the grading market; the company graded 14 million more cards than its closest competitor in 2025 and its parent company, Collectors, is investing $200 million to grow its authentication operations over the next 18 months. It’s focused on growing its physical footprint, developing new technology, and hiring for over 1,000 new positions. There’s something poetic about a 35-year-old human-led authentication business booming in the AI era.

The market professionalized one layer at a time. Grading standardized the product, vaults secured it, marketplaces made it liquid, and pop reports and comps made it priceable. Put those together and you have something that looks a lot more like an asset class than a card show.

There are sophisticated backers at every level of the stack, with firms like Point72 Ventures, D1 Capital, and a16z involved. All of this infrastructure converts an emotional object into a standardized one that can move through marketplaces and across portfolios. That’s what brought in a second kind of buyer, quite different from the enthusiastic hobbyist.

Seven Seven Six Founder Alexis Ohanian recently said, "Having an '86 Fleer Jordan rookie card on my desk in mint condition is a more satisfying flex than having a Warhol." Ohanian is in the camp of people who collect these trophies to feel something. They want the physical thing itself so they can put it on their shelf or wall.

On the other end of the spectrum, the pure investor wants the asset. They buy based on pop reports and comps, hold assets in vaults, and trade without ever touching the thing.

It’s an extremely interconnected ecosystem where each nodes relies on the others. Issuers, marketplaces, and breakers get paid when more product gets printed, opened, and sold. Collectors pay premiums only when scarcity feels believable. Fanatics can build the most powerful version of the stack, and yet it still has to borrow trust from third-party graders and transparent pop reports to keep the whole thing credible.

Getting excited about the card was always the easy part. Believing it was real, rare, and worth the price was hard, and for decades that came down to a handshake at a convention. Now there’s a grader, a vault, and a pop report behind every serious transaction. Trust is the moat, and with a stack that backs it up, this space is just heating up.