Tokenized Pokemon Cards: A New Driver of the RWA Market
Date: 2025-09-05 Author: Gabriel Deangelo Categories: CRYPTO PAYMENTS
According to Danny Wilson, most RWA projects are limited to traditional areas - bonds, real estate, gold or stocks. They do benefit from tokenization, but this does not change the market model itself. The situation is completely different with Pokemon cards: an existing multi-billion dollar market remains predominantly offline.
Today, the exchange of cards looks archaic: sellers send Charizard, Pikachu or Gardevoir to buyers by mail, often without expert assessment. Despite low efficiency, the market is growing - the Whatnot app alone provided $3 billion in transactions last year, a significant part of which was Pokemon.
One of the catalysts for interest was the launch of Solana-based Collector Crypt. The platform offers NFT packages that can be exchanged for original cards. Additionally, the CARDS token was issued, the value of which rose from $23 million to $83 million in a few days, and the FDV reached $386 million. According to the analyst, the coin's capitalization has grown tenfold in a week, and the project is already approaching an annual income of $38 million.
However, success also has risks. CoinGecko, citing Rugcheck.xyz, warned that the Collector Crypt developers have the ability to change the token offer and even block its sale. Despite this, traders' interest is not decreasing. The project team promised to soon reveal details of the CARDS integration into the ecosystem and emphasized that pre-sale funds are used to purchase physical Pokemon cards.
The digital gacha, reminiscent of game loot boxes, has become especially popular: users open random NFTs that can correspond to rare cards. According to the team, this mechanic brought in $70 million in revenue. The project's website already features over 18,000 tokenized cards.
The trading volume of "tokenized Pokemon" is also impressive. In August, it exceeded $124 million on four key marketplaces, which is four times more than in January. Wilson believes that the trend will be sustainable and will be able to go beyond the crypto market, similar to how Polymarket popularized predictive markets.
The new product has generated a lot of discussion in the community. One of the developers with the nickname Chirzhuu noted that he was going to study tokenized Galaxy shares, but ended up finding much more popular assets - Pokemon cards.
Experts have previously emphasized that it is precisely these non-standard asset categories that can benefit from tokenization, creating new demand and opening up prospects for mass adoption.
