Beezie & Collector Crypt CEOs on Why Onchain Collectibles Are Exploding
BeezieAndrea MieleTuomas (Tuom) Holmberg
- On-chain collectibles are among crypto’s most explosive charts, according to the host: Blockworks data showed Collector Crypt at roughly $400M in monthly volume in June and $300M in July, versus $20M the prior July—about a 20x increase by the host’s framing—while Andrea said Beezie had surpassed $200M in volume. The discussion attributes the interest to Pokémon’s cross-generational nostalgia, crypto-native distribution and transparent pack mechanics, not solely to the COVID boom.
- The core mechanic is a transparent-odds vending machine for vaulted physical collectibles represented on-chain: reveal an asset, then choose an instant buyback at 80% to, as Andrea put it, possibly 99%–100% at different price points; hold it vaulted, sell or trade it, or redeem the physical item. Tuomas’ example: a $50 machine with $1,000 deposited yields about $1,100 of cards at eBay auction value on average; selling back common cards while keeping uncommon, rare and epic cards can put those retained tiers about 1% below market.
- Collector Crypt says its supply advantage drives the economics: it sources cards at a 10%–15% discount through 40-plus card shows per year, usually with five people, pricing algorithms and daily bids at 80% of market price on eBay auctions. Some Australian livestreamers reportedly deposit $20,000 and ship hundreds of cards weekly because this is cheaper than sourcing inventory domestically.
- The host’s take-rate table showed both platforms below 10%, versus 20%–25% for some other companies. Andrea said a lead investor once rejected Beezie because its margins were too low, then invested in another platform. Both guests framed lower fees as a user-acquisition and retention strategy: users should not feel they are being “rinsed.”
- Tuomas says Collector Crypt’s lower-tier assets turn over roughly 55 times before being held. Andrea is applying the same asset-velocity pitch to a new category launching next week with a Web2 reseller that has 15M annual users across 80 countries. The category includes assets that had not previously been tokenized; the broader thesis is gamified commerce beyond cards.
- Tuomas characterizes non-crypto digital repack platforms such as GameStop, Power Packs, Arena Club and Courtyard as negative-EV “turnstiles,” with significant buyback haircuts and weaker collector retention. Collector Crypt’s average lifetime user, he said, has spent $15,000–$17,000. The on-chain mix is led by Pokémon and One Piece, while sports cards—60%–70% of graded cards in the non-crypto market, according to the discussion—are less prominent on-chain.
- On the token, Tuomas described a wallet that receives protocol funds roughly every four hours or so and buys tokens, while adding that he had no comment on the wallet and joked it might be a hack. He separately said the team has made discretionary buybacks during sell pressure and bought tokens from VCs seeking exits. He said the team has not sold a single token since launch and that more information would come the following week. Andrea said Beezie is working on a token, with ownership, cap-table, legal and regulatory questions still being addressed.
- Collector Crypt bought a 94,000-square-foot facility, more than 10 times the size of its current vaulting facility, with robotics and loading docks. Tuomas said the buildout is being funded from net operating profits and is intended for a 10x future. He also said he could probably sell the company to a large buyer for $1B, but that reimagining collectibles and returning power to collectors is the goal.
1. Why cardboard is beating Bitcoin: nostalgia as an asset class
- The host says Pokémon cards are “one of the best-performing assets of the year,” outperforming Bitcoin and the S&P, framing the resurgence as something that followed the partial reversal of the 2021 collectibles boom rather than simply a ZIRP-era artifact.
- Andrea’s explanation is structural: “the IP transcends ages and generations.” Her children and people her and Tuomas’ age can all connect with it, and opening a pack creates a “feel-something moment” on either a physical or digital platform.
- Tuomas makes the emotional case with a card he opened from an Arabian Knights box in 1994. He says collectibles can trigger memories of friends and the hobby without the cost or health consequences of other ways people seek pleasure. His own history includes trading and tournament wins to acquire a Black Lotus for $100 in the mid-1990s; he says it might now be worth $25,000–$30,000. He also sold much of his Magic collection in 1997 to pay for college and later realized those cards were worth 20–50 times more.
2. What’s broken: eBay financialized the hobby and fees rose from roughly 5% to 13%
- Tuomas says card collecting once centered on card shows, dealers and direct trades. eBay expanded access globally, but its initial roughly 5% take rate eventually rose to about 13% as fraud and anti-fraud systems became part of the market.
- His causal explanation is that financialization and the removal of human interaction attracted counterfeiters and other attempts to extract money from counterparties. The resulting fraud controls cost money, which increased fees and further shifted the hobby toward a financial asset.
- The platforms’ stated effort is to restore some of the older trading culture with on-chain rails: transparent odds, liquidity, lower friction and direct trading. Tuomas gives the example of finding someone who wants a particular gold-star Pikachu even if it is not a PSA 10.
3. The machine: transparent-odds openings on vaulted physical cards
- The user deposits money through options such as Apple Pay, credit card or Google Pay, enters a machine with transparent odds, reveals an asset, and can accept an instant buyback. Andrea says the buyback percentages range from 80% to, she thinks, 99%–100% depending on the price point. The user can instead keep the asset vaulted, list or trade it, or redeem the physical item.
- Tuomas contrasts this with physical repacks, which have existed for 30–40 years. Sellers may advertise the best possible pulls, but buyers cannot know whether those cards have already been pulled or were ever included. He says using blockchain and transparency can make this experience “10x fairer and more transparent.”
- Andrea says the vending-machine model also helps bring more assets on-chain, creating the depth of liquidity needed for a marketplace and community.
- One anecdotal Beezie data point from Andrea: Solana Sensei reportedly received $182,000 worth of cards through the platform over three months.
4. Unit economics: acquire at a discount, sell selectively near market
- Tuomas says Collector Crypt prices cards using algorithms and human review, aiming at eBay auction value. If three recent sales are between $100 and $110, for example, the platform might price the card at $105.
- Those prices feed a probability-weighted tier matrix. In his example, a $50 machine with $1,000 deposited yields about $1,100 of cards on average at eBay auction value—roughly 10% more value than the amount deposited.
- The supply-side advantage, according to Tuomas, comes from buying at a 10%–15% discount to market. Collector Crypt attends more than 40 card shows annually, usually with five people, uses pricing algorithms and bids 80% of market price on every eBay auction each day.
- If a user sells back common cards and keeps uncommon, rare and epic cards, Tuomas says those retained tiers are effectively acquired at 1% below market. He describes the product as a choice between keeping more value or pursuing a more speculative, high-upside pull.
- He says livestreamers in Canada, Australia and elsewhere use the platform for liquidity. Specifically, some Australian users put $20,000 into the machine and ship hundreds of cards per week because it is cheaper than sourcing inventory domestically.
5. Sub-10% take rates as strategy—and the investor who passed
- The host says a take-rate table showed Beezie and Collector Crypt below 10%, while some other companies were at 20%–25%.
- Andrea says Beezie is at a different stage from platforms that have raised $45M–$50M and have a much larger war chest. She says Beezie competes by making users feel they are winning more and reached more than $200M in volume with “very, very little.”
- Tuomas says Collector Crypt was once rejected by a lead investor because its margins were too low; that fund later invested in another platform. He frames the lower margin as a deliberate user-acquisition strategy.
- The shared principle is that users should not feel they are being “rinsed” each time they use the platform. Lower fees are presented as a way to build community and retention rather than maximize short-term extraction.
6. The 55x turnover flywheel—and why Tuomas calls rivals “turnstiles”
- The host asks whether a high number of pulls followed by instant buybacks resembles wash trading. Tuomas responds that the model works as a business because Collector Crypt’s lower-tier assets typically turn over 55 times before being held.
- Andrea applies the same asset-velocity idea to brands: instead of an item leaving a reseller’s site after one sale, it could transact dozens of times before finally leaving the system. She says Beezie is launching a new category the following week with a large Web2 reseller that has 15M annual users across 80 countries. She says the partnership involves assets that had not previously been tokenized and is intended to bring users on-chain.
- Tuomas characterizes GameStop, Power Packs, Arena Club and Courtyard as non-crypto digital repack competitors with no positive expected value and substantial buyback haircuts. He says collectors may enjoy opening packs but often conclude they would be better off buying cards at a show.
- He calls this model a “turnstile”: marketing brings users in, they open packs, and then they leave. By contrast, he says Collector Crypt’s average lifetime user has spent $15,000–$17,000, while many users build on-chain collections and participate in its Discord.
- The guests also criticize copycat platforms that have a front end but lack secure vaulting, authentication, insurance and deep liquidity. Tuomas warns that even an honest operator storing cards at home faces substantial risk.
7. What blockchain adds—and who the customers are
- Tuomas contrasts an off-chain flow in which a GameStop buyer can sell back to GameStop, vault at PSA, ship the card or list it on eBay. He says each step is deliberate and monetized, including transaction fees.
- On Collector Crypt, he says the tokenized card can be traded on Magic Eden, traded on Collector Crypt, sent to a friend or given as a gift. He also describes a zero-fee marketplace infrastructure that others can use to build specialized venues, such as a Japanese-language Yu-Gi-Oh! marketplace.
- Andrea says both teams’ growth has been driven heavily by crypto-native users, including people who followed Beezie from the Blast days, when it was called The Colony. Tuomas says Collector Crypt chose Solana partly for its NFT culture and community; leaders from Galactic Geckos and DJ Ape Academy used the platform before its public launch.
- Andrea observes that on-chain interest is concentrated in Pokémon and One Piece, while Magic is less prominent because players do not typically grade their cards. Sports cards are also less prominent on-chain, even though Tuomas says sports cards make up 60%–70% of cards graded in the non-crypto market.
- Tuomas sees the product mix as evidence of genuine collectible interest, while acknowledging that some users are also returning to the hobby because Pokémon is performing well and they may make money. Andrea adds that many users understand collecting and are returning after a one- or two-decade hiatus.
- Andrea’s longer-term thesis is gamified commerce for a new generation of earners, expanding beyond collectibles. She points to blind boxes on StockX and imagines user-generated content around pulling a Birkin or Chanel bag for a fraction of its apparent value.
8. Token buybacks, community ownership and a 10x buildout
- Tuomas says there is a “mysterious wallet” that receives money from the protocol roughly every four hours or so and only buys back tokens. He says he has no comment on it and jokes that the protocol may have been hacked.
- Separately, he says Collector Crypt has made discretionary, non-programmatic buybacks during periods of expected sell pressure, including a large December selloff, and has bought tokens from VCs seeking to exit without dumping on the market. He says these activities have been occurring for 12 months and that more information would be available the following week.
- Tuomas says the team has not sold a single token since launch. His rationale for having a token is that a community can participate in the growth of an early-stage platform in a way he considers difficult outside crypto. He contrasts that with Web2 companies backed by major venture-capital investors, where communities do not necessarily participate in the company’s growth.
- He also says he could probably sell Collector Crypt to a large buyer for $1B, but that this is not his goal. He wants to build a larger on-chain liquidity layer and return more power to collectors.
- Andrea says Beezie is working on a token “every day,” while working through ownership, legal, regulatory and existing-cap-table issues.
- Blockworks data cited by the host put Collector Crypt’s monthly volume at about $400M in June and $300M in July, versus $20M the previous July. Tuomas says Collector Crypt bought a 94,000-square-foot facility—more than 10 times the size of its current vaulting facility—with robotics and loading docks. He says the buildout is being funded from net operating profits and is designed for a 10x future.
Full transcript
Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products.
All right, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. We have a hotly requested episode, probably the most requested episode we’ve had in a while. I think many people have seen gacha games, TCGs, and Pokémon going crazy, and some of that is happening on-chain. Hopefully, you’ve seen the Blockworks data charts going up and to the right. They’re probably the most explosive charts in the industry right now.
I wanted to do an episode with 2 of the best people I know to talk about this topic: Andrea, who runs Beezie, and Tuom, who runs Collector Crypt. Tuom and Andrea, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us.
I feel like we need to set the stage early because I don’t even know the answer to this. Are you guys mortal enemies, or is this direct? Is there a long history here? No history? You know each other? Let’s set the stage.
We’ve been talking about this thing together for a long time. We’re not mortal enemies at all. Aside from my team, Andrea is one of my favorites in the space for sure. They’re just solid individuals.
Likewise. With 25 companies popping up every month trying to do the same thing, it’s really important that the good actors know each other so we can help improve the industry and elevate what people are looking for in a project like this.
Yeah.
We’ve known Beezie for 3 years. They used to even be called something different.
We met them initially.
It’s been fun. It’s good working with good people.
Good. Tuom, maybe we can start with the first question here. I’m going to ask a bunch of really basic questions because I don’t know this market at all. I don’t even really know it. I collected Pokémon cards when I was 13 and then sadly stopped.
1. How Collectibles Became a Market
I think we should get a little bit of the history here. Tuom, I know you’ve been in and around the card space for many decades. I’m very curious: When did these become a market to you? When did this go from, “Oh, this is a nice card game,” to, “Oh, this is a really booming market”? When did that shift happen? Maybe you can walk us through the history of how this market came to be.
Sure. About 150 years ago—no, I’m just kidding. My own personal journey started with playing Magic: The Gathering in 1993, late 1993. I got very lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and that happened to be New York City, for what it’s worth. I don’t live there anymore, though.
I played a lot of early Magic. I opened a lot of early packs and won a lot of early tournaments. I think I started to understand the trading hustle probably in 1994–1995. I couldn’t go to my parents and be like, “Hey, I need $100. I need to go buy this Black Lotus piece of cardboard.” My parents would be like, “No, you’re not. You’re not going to buy that Black Lotus.” I’d say, “Come on, let me go buy that Black Lotus,” and they’d say, “Well, no. You’ve got to go hustle for that yourself.”
I’d trade, do this kind of stuff, win tournaments, and get a Black Lotus for $100, right? Now that card is probably worth $25,000–$30,000. I keep thinking, “What if you just gave me $1,000?” Everybody could have retired. But everybody has that kind of story. That’s not the way the world works.
I won enough and hustled enough that, in 1997, I started selling a lot of my Magic: The Gathering cards. I actually wound up with enough capital to pay for college myself. I did get some scholarships, but I didn’t have to pull any money out from my parents, and that was a big achievement for me in the late ’90s.
Unfortunately, looking back at it, that was probably the stupidest thing I could have ever done because those cards are worth 20 to 50 times what they were back then. But it is what it is. That’s how I got in, and that’s why I’m here today. I still love it.
Andrea, you came into this world later than Tuom, I think. You were in the healthcare world and then, maybe a couple of years ago, came into this. Give me the story here.
My history with collectibles is a little bit broader, and it stems from behaviors in childhood. I was raised by a dad I call a speculative collector. He was always getting coins, cards, comics—you name it. At some point, he was buying these things not because he loved them, but because they were going to 10x, 20x, or 30x. I was at the racetrack a lot of weekends. I could read a racing paper when I was really young, and I’d get scratch tickets in my birthday card. I thought that behavior was normal. It’s what I grew up with, but looking back now, I see the connections.
I started my career in high-tech healthcare, got involved in Bitcoin around 2015, and went down the blockchain rabbit hole around 2019. I saw the NFT bull run come up and was fascinated by all the behaviors I was seeing in front of me.
I met my co-founder, Pritique[?], and looked at it broadly. There’s something really antiquated in the resale of collectibles, and this was before people had really leaned into the gamification part. It was more, “Hold on, we can do this more efficiently with liquidity and all these other pieces.” What’s the market that needs it most?
2. Why Are Pokémon Cards Booming?
Inherently, with TCGs and sports cards, you’re not changing the behavior when someone rips a pack with what we do, right? You’re just leaning into it and throwing some gas on the fire. That made sense as the right place to find the wedge.
Why are collectibles and Pokémon so obviously having this moment? Everyone knows that collectibles ripped in 2021, and I think there was a lot of thought that was like, “Look, this was a very natural thing because ZIRP and everything was ripping, there’s infinite money in the world, and these things will crash back to zero—or not much value—over time.”
I think that happened for a little bit. Now, I’m not sure how many people listening to this podcast realize this, but Pokémon cards are, I think, one of the best-performing assets of the year. They’re definitely outperforming both Bitcoin and the S&P, along with many, many other assets. Why are Pokémon cards and collectibles having such a resurgence right now?
When I look at Pokémon cards, the most obvious piece is that the IP transcends ages and generations. It’s not adult-specific. My kids love it, and people my age and Tuom’s age love it as well.
I think that’s a big piece of the storyline, too. It’s nostalgia. It’s interesting. You get this feel-something moment, whether you’re opening a pack or on a site like Collector or Beezie. I think that’s a big piece of it.
For me, COVID and everything brought people back to take a look. When you haven’t jumped in the ocean for 10 years and you go back, you’re like, “Man, why haven’t I jumped in the ocean for 10 years?”
For me, collectibles—I just leaned over to pull this guy out—are a card I actually opened myself from an Arabian Knights box back in 1994. It was one of my favorite cards to play in tournament decks at the time.
There’s very little in this world that’s free, right? I own it. I bought it in a pack for $5 30 years ago. Whenever I pick up this card and look at it, it takes my brain back to places I haven’t thought about. It’s not a can of booze. It’s not a hit of cocaine. It’s not all these other things that people do to give themselves some joy and happiness. All I have to do is look at this card, and this is free and healthy.
I pick up this card and I’m like, “Oh, man, I should give Ricky a call, my best friend from high school.” I look at this card and I’m like, “I wonder how Glenn’s doing over at Neutral Ground.” Or maybe John Finkele, who’s now in the Magic: The Gathering Hall of Fame. I wonder if Jon even remembers me. We played a lot back in the day.
Right.
This is something that I know you could put into a spreadsheet and say, “Okay, this card doesn’t have any intrinsic value. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just sitting there. Why do you even want it?”
The answer is, you never had that experience, right? You never had this experience when you were in high school with this. It could be a memory, like with baseball and sports cards. It could be a memory of spending time with your grandfather at a card show.
Right.
3. What’s Broken In Collectibles?
These are all, I think, for people who are in the hobby and collect. Being able to go and instantly feel good picking something like this up, looking at it, and thinking about what that meant for you is priceless.
What is broken with the market structure? It seems like things are working pretty well, right? The asset class is going up a lot, so people would say it’s working well. What’s broken with the market structure?
I think you guys are almost solving for collectibles what Bitcoin was like 15 years ago, where there’s really no market structure around it.
You have the ability to buy and sell these things, but other than that, there’s really nothing—and maybe even the buying and selling is a little bit janky. Can you walk me through what’s broken with the market structure of buying and selling cards today, or collectibles in general?
Yeah, I’ll jump on this one. I think in the 1990s and 1980s, you’d go to a card show and sit across the table from somebody who had a collection. You’d do some trades, or you’d go to a dealer. You weren’t getting the best price from the dealer because, hey, they had to make money too, right? That’s fair.
eBay came along and said, “Let’s create this whole system where you can trade with people anywhere on the planet very quickly and easily.” eBay’s initial take rate was around 5% back in the late 1990s. Over time, what’s happened is that this was a hobby—something that people did for fun and enjoyment—and because of the financialization of the asset class, and because eBay abstracted away a lot of the human interactions that were there, these have trended more and more toward being a financial asset over the last 30 years.
What that means is that you have a lot of people who come into the space and say, “I have a good idea for how to make more money off this,” or, “I know how I’m going to defraud somebody on the other end of the deal on eBay. I’m going to print some fake Magic cards and do this.” All of this fraud comes in because people are trying to make some money. I get it. I’d prefer they do other things with their intelligence than print fake Magic cards, but some people choose what they do.
Then eBay has had to say, “Okay, how do we prevent this? We need to do all these different antifraud measures. We need to set up these systems.” That all costs money, so they’re also going to tack on additional fees and bring it up to around 13%.
And just that kind of friction—you can imagine that the ideas of eBay, the ideas that people had trading back in the ’90s, have mostly gone away, right? And it’s been replaced with this hyper-financialization of these markets. You have a lot of people like me who still collect because I love it, right? But I take a look around and I don’t want my kids to not be able to experience collecting and not be able to experience the hobby the way that I want them to experience it. And so, I think Beezie and Collector Crypt are here to try to take all of these different points and say, “Okay, extremely high transaction fees, fraud, settlement, allowing people to actually interact on a first-person basis, right? Being able to set up a Discord where you could go and say, ‘Hey, man. I got this. I really want your gold star Pikachu. I had one when I was a kid. I really want to trade for it. I don’t care if it’s not a PSA 10.’ Being able to bring back some of that old feel, old vibe of trading and collecting, I think, is what we’re both trying to solve. And we’re trying to solve it in a fair and transparent way.”
Yeah.
You know, I think you just have a ton of friction that’s happened. It’s not eBay’s fault, right? eBay is responding to human nature, which is to try to hustle some edge or hustle some money out of people.
And Andrea, when did—I’m going to botch the terms here—but when did box breaking, or rips and ships, or whatever it’s called—I think it’s hot with the streamers—when did that happen? I remember during COVID, people were just bored during the pandemic, and they started opening packs. I feel like that was half the videos I saw online.
4. How Do The Economics Work?
You guys should correct me, but my mental model of how I think about Courtyard and Collector Crypt is almost just a more professionalized version of that. Maybe walk me through that. And, by the way, correct me if I’m wrong about that mental model of the business.
Yeah, I think they can go hand in hand, but they’re different models. I remember we were a Techstars company, and I remember being on that stage years ago and talking about this idea of shoppertainment. Whatnot wasn’t where it is right now, obviously, and Asia has really been a leader in that market. We’ve seen, over the last 1.5 to 2 years, the resurgence of that in the U.S. market.
5. How Digital Packs Actually Work
I think we’re going to see a marriage of the things that Tuom and I have built with this live-streaming shopping experience. The broader picture is that consumers are less interested in a static sale and just clicking the Buy button. They want to engage, they want to have fun, and there’s a dopamine chase. I really believe that these pieces are going to live together.
Okay. I want to get into both of your businesses. The way I understand it is that you guys are buying real, graded cards—often Pokémon—you vault them, and then you mint a token that represents the card. You can buy a sealed digital pack; it reveals a random card, and then I think you get to keep it or sell it to another person, or do the instant—no, I’m already wrong. I’m already—
You’re so close. You’re so close.
Fix it for me.
I’ll give you the high level because it’s similar, right? You come onto one of our platforms and buy into one of our machines. The odds are transparent; everything is in front of you. You reveal the asset, and when you reveal it, we give you the option to allow us to buy it back from you.
The ranges are anywhere between 80% and, I think, 99% to 100% for different price points. You can choose to take that or not. If you decide to swap it—that’s what we call it—the liquidity goes right into your account, and we get the asset back.
If you decide to hold it, you can hold it knowing it’s safely vaulted, or you can sell it on the marketplace, like Tuom was talking about. You can make a trade with someone, you can redeem it, and you get the physical asset sent to you.
Tuom, is your Collector Crypt similar?
Yeah, it’s substantially the same. I think the space is very complex, right? People look at our platforms and say, “Well, you’ve solved this one piece of it.” A stupid cliché is that Rome wasn’t built in a day. We have to create product-market fit, build the right foundation, and slowly but surely, people are going to onboard assets and start participating in the platform. That’s what we’ve seen, and we both have a lot of product-market fit around our vending machine.
One of the interesting things is that if you put these NFTs on-chain and run them through this kind of digital repack mechanism, that’s a far more efficient way to distribute cards than a physical repack is. Physical repacks have been around for 30 or 40 years. People get a stack of cards, seal them in little foil packages, and sell them for a certain price. Then they have a list that says, “Here are the top 3 things you can get out of these packs.”
But nobody knows if those cards have already been pulled. Nobody knows if those cards are even in those packs. It’s still kind of fun for people to engage with because they see that there’s a Michael Jordan rookie card in there and they want to win it.
6. What Does Blockchain Actually Add?
I think what we’ve done at Collector Crypt and Beezie is take one small fraction of the overall collectibles ecosystem and ask, “Where can we use blockchain, and where could we use transparency to make this a 10× fairer and more transparent experience?”
Yeah, and the thing is that it also feeds into one of our major goals, which is to bring as many assets on-chain as we can. You need to have that depth of liquidity for a marketplace to work and to build communities and ecosystems. This vending-machine model does that extremely well.
Can you walk me through what happens if I spend $100 on the platform? Walk me through the flow of $100, because I know there are the buybacks, customer deposits, your treasury, and the resale of the cards. I’m trying to trace the flow of $100 as it goes through the platform.
I think our backends are probably similar, but they have slight variations. Largely, you’d deposit $100 and hit Buy. You can also pay with Apple Pay, a credit card, or Google Pay. Then you’re going to reveal the asset.
This is all built into the website. We wanted to abstract the chain as much as possible for someone who isn’t crypto-native. You’re going to see the card, the slab, or the sealed product. We’re going to be expanding categories in the next week as well, which we’re excited about. You’re going to reveal that asset, and then you’re going to get an offer to buy it back at a certain percentage of fair market value.
If you choose that, those funds immediately go to your account.
And what—I’m not sure. This might be public data, it might not be, but what is the percentage payout, like the almost expected return? I’m guessing there are different types of users who are using the platform, Andrea. There are the collectors, the maybe-flippers, the people who want to make 10% a year and are happy with that, and the people who want the grail and are just trying to hit 100x every time. Do you guys have numbers on expected returns?
I mean, it depends on the price point. It depends on how much someone’s playing. We just saw, I think it was Solana Sensei saying that he got $182,000 worth of cards in the last 3 months on the platform. His returns might look different from someone else’s, but we’re really transparent with our odds. You can see exactly what’s in the machine at that point in time.
As the user, you determine whether this is going to give you the ROI you want, either in the form of the actual item or in the form of the odds and the average value that you’re playing at.
Yeah, I could be a little specific with respect to our platform. On each of our packs, we have a different premium to market-price expected value, and there’s a lot baked in here. I’m going to do my best to make it simple and summarize, but we price all of our cards out, and we have some pretty sophisticated algorithms on our side to do that. Also, every single card is priced by a human, and we price the cards as our best attempt at what the card would be at eBay auction value.
So, if a card has recently sold on eBay 3 times in the last week between $100 and $110, we might price that card at $105. Then, when those cards all get added to the machine—let’s say you have 1,000 cards in the machine—we multiply that into our tier matrix and figure out the expected value of the cards based on a probability-weighted matrix. What are you going to pull out of the machine?
For example, for a $50 machine, if you put $1,000 into it, on average, you’re going to take out $1,100 worth of cards. This is by eBay auction price. If you’re saying, “Well, hey, I want to go and buy a bunch of cards on eBay,” you’re willing to pay that price. If you bought those same cards and won them through our machine, you’d pay 10% less.
So, that’s kind of one piece of it. Then the question is, how do you guys make money? One answer is that we buy these cards at a 10% to 15% discount to market price. If people just use it and keep the cards, they’re able to get that liquidity without having to spend all the time on eBay.
We actually have a few users, and I’m not super thrilled about this, but it is what it is. We have livestreamers in Canada, Australia, and other places around the world that actually use us as their single source of liquidity. We have guys in Australia putting $20,000 into our machine, never selling cards back, and shipping hundreds of cards per week to Australia because it’s cheaper for them to open up packs on our machine than it is to source inventory domestically.
And why—how are you able to get them 10% to 15% cheaper, Tuomas?
Well, over the past 4 or 5 years, we’ve built one of the best buying networks that exists in the space. We go to 40-plus card shows per year, usually with 5 different people. In addition to that, I mentioned we have our pricing algorithm, and we’re also essentially a floor bid on eBay. So, every single auction—
That happens every single day on eBay, we’re bidding 80% of market price on every single one of those auctions.
Is the harder part of your guys’ business—I’m trying to understand this from the founders’ point of view—what it’s like to build your business? That’s why I’m asking weirdly detailed questions about how you make a pack profitable and these kinds of things. Is the supply side harder, like getting the cards at good rates, or the demand side? I’m guessing the demand side is much harder.
It’s a little bit of both. I mean, you’ve seen, as I mentioned, 25 copycat platforms show up, and they each vibe-code a front end. They’re able to get some users if they go and promise, “Oh, hey, we’re going to do this 100% buyback,” or, “Hey, we’re launching a token,” or, “Hey, this or hey, that.” They kind of solve that UI part, but then—
They go on camera or something, and they’re showing off product like me, saying, “Blah, blah, blah.”
And it’s like, dude, you’re selling that stuff on your platform. That’s in your closet. You’re shipping it out of your grandma’s closet at home.
Right? That’s not a vault. That’s not a secure facility. That’s not authentication. That’s not a platform that has deep liquidity. If anything goes wrong, they’ll take care of you. What happens if your house burns down? Do you have insurance? There are a bunch of people that, even if they are honest and transparent, are still not doing it the right way because if they think about it a little bit, there’s just a tremendous risk surface there.
Yeah.
Getting back to the financial side of it, if you are opening up the $50 machine, yes, there are cards worth $4,000 or $5,000 in there. You’re not going to hit that card every time, right? If you keep all the cards, you’re going to wind up with a bunch of $30 slabs. You’re going to wind up with a bunch of cards that are worth under $50, and that’s going to be the majority of them—80%.
If you ask somebody like me, I’m saying, “I love collecting. This is the card I want,” right? You take a look at other collectors. They’re not saying, “Oh, here’s a stack of $30 cards. It just makes me so happy to have a stack of $30 cards.” They don’t want that. They want to filter through to get the big hit in the machine.
So, there isn’t much utility for people unless they are distributing the product in a secondary way.
There’s not much utility for somebody to go and collect 30 slabs and ship them to themselves because if they go to a card show, or if they go anywhere, they’re not able to sell that for full market price. If they sell it on eBay for $30, they’re going to pay extra shipping and handling, and they’re paying eBay a 13% transaction fee.
Got it.
So, you’re not really making money if you go and collect a bunch of $30 slabs. What you do with our product—the way we’ve designed it—is, if you sell back all of those common cards and keep the uncommon, rare, and epic cards, you’re actually buying those 3 tiers at 1% under market price.
7. Ads (TOKEN2049, Avalanche Summit)
The way we make our money is that we’re buying those cards at a 10% to 15% discount, and we’re selling them to users, if they follow this strategy, at a 1% discount to market price. So, it’s kind of like a pick-your-own-adventure. You could go as value-positive as you want, or you could go as degen as you want. If you go as degen as you want, you’re only keeping the best cards that you pull.
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8. Can Lower Fees Win Users?
Gotcha. Okay. Andrea, there’s an investor who I think is an investor in both of you guys. I don’t know if it was a private investor or a public one, but anyway, there’s an investor in both of you guys. I asked him for some questions, and I was scrolling through his Twitter feed. At one point, he tweeted at the take-rate table, which I think has both of you at a sub-10% take rate. There are a couple of other companies that are at a 20% to 25% take rate.
I’m curious how you guys think about the take rate right now, as there’s a big conversation in a lot of markets about fees. Is it better to keep fees low, grow the pie, or scale the business? Or do you want to start monetizing as this market is getting really, really crazy? I’m curious how you, Andrea, think about leaving margin on the table. How do you think about what the right take rate is for this type of business?
Yeah, I mean, we’re at a very different stage in our life cycle as a company than some of the other platforms.
And, you know, I think we're referencing some of the others that have much larger take rates. So when I look at it, how does Beezie compete with a platform that's raised $45–$50 million and has a war chest that's essentially endless? It's by making people feel like they're winning more, right? And we've been pretty successful with that. We've gotten to where we are, which is over 200 million in volume, with very, very little.
For us, at the end of the day, it's about listening to feedback, building for the community, and not feeling like we're extracting from them. And, you know, I think that Tuomas probably has a really similar view, like—
You don't want people to show up, use the platform, and feel like they're getting rinsed every time they're there. And you're clearly seeing that on other platforms.
So with us, it was a business strategy. Fun fact: we actually got turned down by a lead in the past because our margins were too low. This particular fund actually invested in one of the other platforms. And I'm like, listen, it's a user acquisition strategy, and at the end of the day, it's how we compete.
Yeah, 100%. How do you think about—again, this might be a really dumb question—but are instant buybacks a good or a bad thing on the platform? Maybe my mental model is off because I'm thinking about crypto exchanges. I'm thinking about wash trading, where if I'm looking at something, you have 10 million pulls, but then 9.9 million instant buybacks on a crypto exchange, you could almost call that wash trading in a sense.
I think it's different here, but I'm trying to wrap my head around why. But, yeah—
No, as a business model, of course it makes sense, right? Our lower-tier assets typically turn over 55 times before they're ever held. For our higher tiers, it's a completely different number.
But, you know, for me, when I'm talking with bigger brand partners, it's a brand-new revenue model for them, right? Instead of a reseller coming to work with us and losing that asset after the single sale, those assets work for them now much, much harder.
Can you explain that, Andrea? Wait, so you go to a brand—what are you doing on the brand-partner side? This is for—
So we're launching a new category next week with a big Web2 reseller. One of the ways that you work into the pitch early on is that, right now, that asset leaves your site as soon as that sale happens. It's gone, right? Whether it's your inventory or one of your users' inventories.
Imagine if it sold 55 times before it ever left, and you've worked them through the math model. I think that's the unlock around taking what we've both done here, leaning into our crypto roots, finding this wedge and product-market fit in this space, and then applying it much more broadly to commerce as a whole.
How do you think about pricing assets, though? If you expand into—I don't know—hot collectibles like sneakers and watches and things like that, the pricing gets a little trickier, I would guess.
Yeah, it's much harder, right? You don't have the same tools that you have with cards in general, but there's typically always last sales or variations of what's happening. We're doing this with a partner that has 15 million annual users across 80 different countries, and it's—
They have a ton of data.
Tons of data.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. I might just give a slightly harder take than Andrea on some of that. I know she's very polite.
Tuomas, you're polite, too.
No, I could be a real jerk sometimes. One of the things, if you take a look at the data with some of the—and I'm thinking more like non-crypto competitors—I think, thankfully, in the crypto space, a lot of companies and entrants are essentially forced to follow the model that Beezie and Collector Crypt have developed, right?
But if you take a look at the non-crypto space, the dynamics are a little bit different, right? And we know this because a lot of users on our platform are actually former users of these other platforms, so we know exactly their mental model and why they made the transition and why they've stayed.
Tuomas, just to—sorry to interrupt—you said former users of what types of other platforms?
Non-crypto digital repack companies.
Understood. Okay.
Like the big ones, like GameStop, Power Packs, Arena Club, and Courtyard, right? All those platforms have no positive expected value. They have a pretty significant haircut on buybacks.
What we see in the data is that the users who are genuine collectors don't really feel that they're getting much value out of that, right? And so they go and they might participate on that platform for a little bit, and they say, “Wow, I should just buy cards at the card show. This isn't the best way for me to collect.”
But they do enjoy the thrill of opening packs, right? And then that's where these users come and start exploring platforms like ours, because they can have their cake and eat it, too. They can come in, sell back a bunch of cards, and then finally filter through the card they want to keep.
Then they say, “Wow, I had a great time. I opened up 10 packs and I got this one card, and I'm actually not down that much. I'm basically buying these cards for a little bit over market price, in that sense.”
Our average lifetime user on our platform has spent somewhere between $15,000 and $17,000 on the platform. A lot of our users have shipped out cards, built massive on-chain collections, and participate in our Discord all the time. If you take a look at the platforms in the non-crypto side, you don’t really have an ecosystem of collectors that has been built. You don’t have much customer retention. You don’t have such high total lifetime value of these users. Essentially, what I call it is a turnstile, right? People come in, see some great marketing, open up some packs, and say, “Oh, that was fun. Let’s do the next thing.” Our goal is to build the largest liquidity layer for collectibles on-chain, which means that we are very focused on collectors, not people who are just trying to open packs and be a little more degen about it. You know, focusing on collectors—people who actually enjoy the intellectual property, people who will show up every day in the Discord and talk about it, people who will be excited for new sets coming around—essentially creates an ecosystem of people who are going to be there, so you don't have to continuously market to get them to come and open packs.
We feel that this is healthier for the ecosystem, and it's also healthier for the hobby. There's a lot of talk about this Pokémon gambling phenomenon, and I think there is some truth to that. I think we are trying to state clearly on the side of collector behavior, collector attitude, and building a collectibles ecosystem.
You mentioned GameStop, Tuomas. GameStop now offers this—I think—randomized PSA-graded cards, instant buybacks, and physical redemption. Obviously, I don't think GameStop has a blockchain anywhere there. What does putting the asset on-chain actually add to the whole process here?
It adds a much larger universe, because if you buy—if you pick up a card on GameStop—you could choose to sell it back to GameStop, or you could have it vaulted at PSA, right? And then, once it's in PSA, you can choose to ship it, or you could choose to list it on eBay.
So you're kind of going through a string of very intentional steps where each step along the way is going to be monetized in one way or the other. With blockchain, you get a card on Collector Crypt; that is your card, right? You can go and trade that card on Magic Eden. You could trade it on Collector Crypt to whoever you want. You can go and do a swap with your buddy. You can send it to your uncle for a Christmas present, right?
You have this whole universe of things you can do, and we're not limiting the user. In fact, one of the big efforts that we made at Collector Crypt over the last 12 months is to open up a lot of our infrastructure to essentially allow anybody to build on our platform.
We have a zero-fee marketplace that anybody could just pick up and start to build their own marketplace. If somebody's really into Yu-Gi-Oh! and wants to build a Yu-Gi-Oh!-focused marketplace in the Japanese language for Yu-Gi-Oh! collectors, you can do that, and we won't charge you anything for it, right?
That's a very different kind of mechanism from this very deliberate serial process where, at each step, you have 2 choices. One is to ship the card. The other one is to pay 10% in transaction fees. We want to break that process.
Got it. Okay. I think I follow. All right, let's flip over and talk about customer acquisition, because there are probably a couple of charts. Now the charts are starting to look better in August, but for the last year and a half, charts were not looking very good across the board in crypto.
There are a few that look good. It's probably the stablecoin charts, prediction market charts, and collector charts. I see these because Blockworks has a bunch of data on all this stuff.
Andrea, I remember right after you guys launched, I think it was about $2 million in volume within 2 or 3 days of launch, and both of your charts just continue to look very, very good. Where is this growth coming from? Is this people moving over from GameStop and Courtyard? Is this net-new collectors finding out about this? Are these crypto people who are speculators coming over? Who are these customers, and how do you think about marketing?
I don't want to speak for you, Tuom, but both of us are crypto-native teams. We've been building in this space for a really long time. You've seen this type of platform take off and really find product-market fit, and I think a lot of the growth comes from the core crypto community getting exposed to something that is maybe more fun and brings them back to a different point in their life.
I think we both have really strong communities that do an amazing job of talking about both of our brands and bringing new people into their lives. That's a big deal. I think we both have different strategies on future distribution and user acquisition, and that differs very much from our biggest Web2 competitors.
Again, I don't want to speak for Tuom about this, but I give so much credit for our growth to the crypto-native participants who have been with us since the Blast days, when we were The Colony, and have seen the come-up and this model really find itself, when a lot of people in this space didn't believe any of us when we said it was going to work.
Yeah, I'll add to that a little bit. We deliberately chose Solana back in the day, and there were lots of reasons to do it from a technology perspective, but also a lot from a community perspective. It seemed to me in 2021 that the culture of NFTs, the excitement around building communities, and all of this kind of stuff were moving to blockchain.
People know who I am, but they don't know my undoxxed identity. I was minting Bored Apes on Ethereum, and I was minting some of the early NFT projects on Solana, just being able to enjoy those ecosystems. I knew that a lot of the people who were into NFTs from a cultural perspective, not a financial perspective, were also highly aligned with the Pokémon IP.
Just as an example, some of the top people at Galactic Geckos and some of the top people at DJ Ape Academy were all users of our platform before our platform even had a public launch. That was very exciting for me because we knew that there was product-market fit. We knew that the leaders of all of these communities and this culture on Solana would help us to succeed.
The other thing that's interesting—and this is just an anecdote—is that you see on-chain that most of the excitement and product-market fit are around trading card games like Pokémon and One Piece, and not so much Magic, because Magic players usually don't grade their cards. I'm a little weird that way. A lot of people don't collect sports cards on-chain, right? If you take a look at non-crypto, 60% to 70% of cards that are graded are sports cards.
Is that just because it's an older market?
It's an older market. It's a non-crypto market. People are more interested in sports.
And for better or worse, people in crypto are nerds. They're a little bit earlier on the adoption curve. They like watching anime and playing video games, so it's a different kind of thing.
What I would say is that the difference in product mix on-chain is a really strong indicator to me that people are genuinely interested in collectibles. That's how it got started. Then, of course, people see all the difficulty in blockchain over the past 12 months and say, “I haven't been in trading cards for a long time, but I used to play Pokémon, so I kind of get it. I'm going to jump in. I'm going to reestablish this hobby. I'm going to get connected with it again. Maybe I'll even make some money because Pokémon is doing well.”
We saw a lot of that, too. You have true collectors.
You have people who understand collecting and are getting back into it after a 1- or 2-decade hiatus.
9. Can Gamified Commerce Go Mainstream?
How do you both see the collectibles market evolving as Gen Z starts to come into more and more money and becomes a bigger and bigger user base?
I'm super excited about it. I think it's only going to grow. You look at this next generation of earners, what they grew up with, the dopamine chase, and the instant gratification. We've built a really efficient form of opening packs and engaging shoppers.
When I look back at when we started building Beezie, it was for this moment in time in this space, but the forethought was really that this next generation was going to embrace this type of commerce in general. Again, I keep going back to it, but it's not just collectibles, right? It is commerce much more broadly.
I think we're just scratching the surface with the next generation of earners. We're just scratching the surface when it comes to engaging female shoppers, which research shows gamified commerce has been particularly successful with women.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's so early in the conversation.
Yeah. Commerce would be things like sneakers and watches that are traditionally collectibles, or just all commerce?
All commerce. You're seeing StockX do blind boxes, right? It's going to continue to evolve beyond just the thing that someone wants to collect.
Do you have any preview of what you're launching?
There are assets that haven't been tokenized before, and the activation isn't designed just for our current user base. That's a big reason we took this partnership on, because I don't want to sell luxury assets to our community that's here buying Pokémon cards, right? You have to bring in those new users.
The goal is that we take a big chunk of that brand's current user base and bring them on-chain, really without them knowing it.
How much of this story is about being able to do more things with the asset once you own it? Financially, if you have a Rolex or a nice watch or a Pokémon card, oftentimes they sit in your basement. If you need to take out a loan against it, you can't really do that. How much of this story ends up being about that?
I think it's different depending on the asset, right? Some people collect watches not to wear, but to pass down to the next generation. I think there's a huge component in what we both do with that type of asset.
Obviously, with cards, it's the same way with slabs. A lot of people are buying because they hold some value for them around nostalgia, or they're bringing their next generation—their kids—in as users.
I think it's wildly appealing to me to someday see UGC around, “I just pulled this Birkin for $500,” or, “I just unlocked this Chanel bag for $250.” There are many different facets to this.
Yeah, the Birkin idea makes it come to life.
Right. I mean, can you not see—
I can see influencers.
Yeah, I think that would rip. Yeah.
10. Why Collector Crypt Has A Token
Well, stay tuned. Get me back next week.
All right, I will. That sounds great. Tuom, on the token side, this is probably less relevant for Andrea, but what does having a token allow you to do? Why have a token at this point in the business?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have asked that question, and my best answer is that I got into Bitcoin in 2013, got into Ethereum in 2016, and I've been through my fair share of rug pulls.
I've also interacted in the financial space. I did a bunch of risk-management consulting for hedge funds in the 2000s. I got into launching a couple of funds. I've been a biotech executive and entrepreneur for a while. I helped companies go public, so I understand that side of it, too.
I think the ability to allow your community to participate in your platform and participate in the growth of what you're building at a very early stage, in a very efficient way, is unparalleled outside of crypto.
As I've always harped on, every single decision we make at Collector Crypt is about how we build the community and how we make this a better product for our users. How do we make it a better user experience? How do we turn off the turnstile that I was telling you about before and build something where people actually want to show up every day and participate?
The token is part of it, right? It's not, “We're going to give you all of this token for doing this kind of stuff so we can pump up numbers to sell more tokens.” We haven't sold a single token since we launched last year.
What's important to us is for people who truly believe in our platform, truly believe in the idea of RWA collectibles and tokenized collectibles, to have a way to enter into this space while it is still so early. If we did not have a token, if we were purely equity, if we had, you know, insert top 5 VCs here on our cap table like some of our Web2 competitors do, their communities aren't particularly benefiting and participating in the growth, which also sets those platforms up for a different dynamic in how they actually interact with their community. So I really want the token to be a pure manifestation of growing this together with people who believe in you and people in your community. That's why we launched the token.
Sure. I would probably be able to sell the company to one of the big guys there for $1 billion at this point. That's not my goal. My goal is to do something that—and I'm sure my kids would respect the money, too—but I have a little more than that. I want to reimagine the collectibles ecosystem, and I want to put more power back in the hands of the actual collectors.
Andrea, when you see it, I think the thing about that token is that a token is a double-edged sword, right? I mean, it's a nightmare to deal with many times, but when it works right, it gets the people going, right? It gets the narrative going on Twitter. It can almost be a really nice customer-acquisition machine, especially when the market's going up and people are making money and people are happy with the token. Have you thought about whether this model could be right for Beezie?
I mean, every day. Every day we're working really hard on it. Tuom and the guys have done a really good job leading the charge, doing things the right way, and looking out for the community. Collector Crypt has one of the most successful longer-term tokens, right? You guys are coming up on a year, or maybe you just hit a year, and to see the numbers that they continue to put up is something to be really proud of.
I think for all of us as an industry, when I look at the token and relate it to Beezie, I think: How can we double down and kind of force this market to grow up as well? I think a big component of that is ownership. Obviously, there's a ton of legal and regulatory work that goes with that, particularly when you're a company that's not pre-product and you already have a cap table. So one of the big pieces we're working through is that, and there's a lot of great people working on this. I think when you do it right, as Tuom said, you really give your core community—the people who are showing up every day—a piece of building this thing together.
11. How Does Token Value Accrue?
Tuom, how do you think about value accrual for the token? There's a lot of conversations about buybacks, revenue value accrual. How do you think about that for the token?
Yeah, good questions. I'll give you my canned answer, and I'll also say that there's going to be more information next week.
You don't seem like a canned-answer kind of guy, Tuom.
Yeah, I didn't even read the questions you sent out beforehand. I'm just winging it. Sorry about that.
I actually didn't realize that we sent questions ahead of time, so that makes 2 of us.
So what I'll say first is there's been a mysterious wallet that some people have found that, for whatever reason, is getting some money every 4 hours or something from our protocol, and all it does is sit there and buy back the tokens. I have no comment, really, on that, but it exists. It's out there. Maybe we got hacked or something, and there's a weird wallet buying back the tokens.
We've also done what I would call idiosyncratic, non-programmatic buybacks. So when there are periods where we know there's going to be a lot of sell pressure, or when there are certain things happening in the ecosystem—for example, there was a big dump in December or something—we'll come in, add additional liquidity, and buy back the tokens there. Also, some of our VCs want to exit, and they come and say, “We really want to sell these tokens, but we don't want to dump on the token price. Will you buy some back?” And we'll say, “Sure, we'll buy them back.” So through that, we've accumulated a lot of tokens in various wallets. Some people, I'm sure, could dig them up.
The thing that's funny is the number of people on Twitter who say, “We're research experts. We research blockchain stuff,” and then come out and say, “Collector Crypt does no buybacks.” If you spent 3 minutes, you'd be able to see it pretty clearly. I'm really looking forward to next week, when we can talk about it a little bit more, because then people will have something to point to. The thing I think will surprise people—
—is that it's been happening all along.
And what we've been doing has been happening for 12 months, and at some point people are just going to have to deal with the truth.
Yeah. Nice.
TL;DR is people need to pay attention.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People need to pay attention. They need to come into our Discord. They need to listen to the podcast, because here we are at minute 60 on this, and most people wouldn't make it past 5 minutes and then jump on Twitter to say, “Oh, no utility.” They didn't announce it right up front. So that's why I usually say these things right at the end of the podcast.
We can do a nice clip for you. We can be like, “CC has buybacks,” and there you go.
No, you've got to leave it in as a secret.
Yeah.
12. How Big Can This Get?
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Guys, what have we not talked about that you think is important or that you think others might be missing? Obviously, Tuom, you mentioned this at minute 55, but what do you guys think others are missing that we haven't talked about yet?
I think one question is: Where does it go from here, right? We kind of touched on it. We touched on category expansion. We touched on some of the ideas around getting into non-crypto user bases. But what is this going to look like in 5 years? Is this going to disrupt Amazon? Is this going to disrupt any type of traditional retail?
So tell me—while you do that, I'm pulling up your monthly volume chart, which is just up and to the right here. Let's maybe get quantitative with it, too. Your monthly volume, at least from Blockworks, is: June was $400 million; July is $300 million. By the way, for context, that's up from last July, which was only $20 million. So it's about a 20x increase in the last year. Where do you think this is a year from now?
What I'll say is we've bought a 94,000-square-foot building, which is more than 10 times the size of our current vaulting facility. We're building robotics. We're building the ability to handle multiple different kinds of assets. It has loading docks, so you could pull up with a trailer truck. I think we are building for a 10x future from here.
And are you building this stuff with the profits that the business is kicking off, from fundraising, or from—you mentioned you haven't sold the token—but from where? How are you funding this?
We're funding this from profits from the platform, or, net-net, we're funding it from net operating profits and then investing that into CapEx and growth.
Andrea, where do you think this whole category goes?
I think it continues to expand beyond the current wedge. I think we see bigger brands leaning into it. I think we see the eBays of the world trying to do it. The gamification of commerce is just getting started, and that expands beyond collectibles.
Yeah, 100%. Tuom, Andrea, thank you guys. This was great, and congrats. I do feel like, having this conversation with you guys, it is very early days for both Beezie and Collector Crypt. So congrats to both of you guys.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thank you both.
Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only. And the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.