If you’re into NFTs, it’s likely you’ve heard of the analogy “NFTs are like trading cards.”

And if you’re much deeper into NFTs, you might scoff at this analogy. “Pffff. But NFTs are so much more than just physical cards.” And you’re right. NFTs are a 1.8 trillion dollar industry, while trading cards are an estimated market of 1.3 billion. However, there are clear parallels between the history of the trading card industry and those of NFTs that shouldn’t go overlooked.

In fact, by learning about the boom and bust (and boom) cycle of trading cards, you’ll come to the realization that the next NFT bull run is simply no longer a matter of “if” but “when”. 👀

Let’s cover some basics: what are trading cards? They are a small card, usually made of paper, which contains an image of a certain person, place, or thing, meant as a prize or collectible. But what you probably didn’t know was how trading cards were around for almost a century before it became mainstream. In fact, the first trading cards weren’t even meant for trading! They were advertisements (i.e., ads for a business’s “trade”) and eventually pieces of paper they put in paper cigarette boxes to retain the shape of cigarettes. The first trading cards closest to its modern counterpart were baseball cards in the 1860s, still a century before things got exciting.

And like what blockchain did for NFTs, technological advancements laid the groundwork for trading cards to hit its first renaissance. Two prominent were color lithography (or multi color printing), which allowed companies to package these cards as prizes instead of placeholders, and television, which allowed fandoms to develop around sports and athletes beyond just baseball. The teenage baby boomers at the time bought and traded these popularized cards. But these cards mostly ended up discarded or used as bicycle spokes. They were just considered an afterthought, you know, like the prize you get from a McDonalds happy meal. It was only 30 years later when they blossomed into a real market.

We skip to the 1980s and see the fruits of technology and popularization of trading cards (and the scarcity of it) rise into a trading card frenzy. Investors and collectors alike began to recognize earlier trading cards as valuable assets. Old vintage cards (cards that were discarded or misused from decades ago) were sold by 20x to 100x multipliers! Baby boomers, fueled by FOMO, began buying and collecting cards again. Despite the market being highly speculative and disjointed, the early adaptors, enamored by the possibilities of profits, were eager to tell others to buy as many cards as they could. To give you an objective perspective of how popular cards were, by the early 1990s, the circulation of the Beckett price guide magazine had nearly 1M subscribers (by comparison, today’s Washington Post has 400k subscribers).

Everyone was looking for cards, believing that some of them will lead to generational wealth down the line. Sounds awfully familiar, no?

The 1990s should have been the golden years for trading cards. But after seeing the boom, companies began printing billions – yes billions (81 billion to be exact) – of trading cards. To make things worse, after the public learned of the hype and investment potential of cards, everyone started buying and holding, hoping the cards would appreciate, making them very illiquid. And long story short, the cultural phenomenon died off once the bought cards became useless by the 1990s. So useless that they were dumping and burning cards. Even today, cards from the 1990s are deemed worthless. The average age of card collectors and holders moved from 13 to 38 years old, with only maniacs and passionate collectors left to carry on “The Hobby.”

I'm condensing a toooon of history here, but for folks who have seen the highs and lows of the NFT market, the history of trading cards should sound very familiar. Swap certain words and phrases with NFT terms, and we are repeating the same story.

The earliest traded cards meant for cigarette boxes? They were simply the very first NFTs, like Colored Coins, which were meant to represent real world assets (ew), invented back in 2012. Replace lithography and TVs with Ethereum blockchain and ERC721 standardization, and we get the explosion of NFTs in 2018, similar to that of the trading card phenomena of the 1980s. Early adopting baby boomers are just today’s VCs and senior software developers with money to spend on their new digital hobby. And the oversaturation leading to the crash? Obviously I'm generalizing nuances, but there were about 17 million NFTs in circulation before 2019, compared to 52 million NFTs in circulation today.

Well, just like the earlier trading cards, the NFT market crashed. Uh, so what, are NFTs done for? Not quite. 30 years later, since the bust of trading cards, we witnessed another, even larger boom. A lot of folks point to COVID as the main reason for this resurgence of trading cards (lockdown + nostalgia). But this trivializes the technology and the players within the space that, yet again, laid the foundation for its continued growth. 

With the internet at play, trading cards were bought and sold at a different scale. Card producers, adapting from mistakes in the 1980s, have been meticulous about the number of cards they produce and drop, creating scarcity and fueling FOMO. Social media and marketing continue to drive interest in this market (think Logan Paul and his Charizard, or any viral unboxing videos you’ve seen). We now also have grading companies, like PSA and BGS, but also pricing and data analytic companies, all aimed to legitimize the value of these assets. There are trading card games like Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon, which are just as valuable, if not more profitable, than their sports counterparts. Back then, it was the salespeople going to conventions and doing TV commercials to sell their cards. Now, we have virtual marketplaces, buy-now-pay-later platforms, vaults, and fractional ownership of trading cards and sports memorabilia. The reason? They are all trying to bridge the gap between trading cards and finance, making the cards more liquid. We’re even witnessing NFT trading cards, where companies like NBA Top Shot or Candy Digital are taking traditional sports trading cards and turning them into NFTs!

I can’t even make this up. Almost identical players and financialization tools that keep the trading card space running are coming up in the NFT space, just at a much larger and complex scale. Card producers? Every new collection is almost a startup of its own, with their own dedicated team and roadmaps for users to see. And not to mention, each collection is meticulous about the number of whitelists and NFTs they release to maintain scarcity and demand. Social media and marketing? Twitter and memes are the name of the game, with virality considered one of the most important metrics. Pricing oracles? Check out your NFT’s spicy worth here! For marketplaces, we have OpenSea, LooksRare, and Magic Eden. And with blockchain technology, we have so many protocols and projects that are beginning to offer more market efficient solutions and products to users – all aimed to make NFTs more liquid.

These new developments should be exciting (we’ll go over these in an upcoming blog post about the ecosystem), especially putting into context the resurgence of trading cards. Trading cards didn’t die from a lack of interest in the 1990s; it was immature “card-nomics” (companies hyper-inflating card supply, with not much focus on tackling low liquidity) and lack of infrastructure (an authoritative source to register and look up cards and marketplaces to efficiently trade cards) that made cards eventually illiquid. Once these pain points were addressed in the modern day world with a variety of stakeholders to support the market, trading cards came roaring back. And the cool thing is, current stakeholders building in the NFT space, utilizing blockchain technologies, are focused on building out this infrastructure for NFTs as we speak – just at a much larger, complex scale!

By now, you have more knowledge than the general public about the history of trading cards. But alternatively, you’ve also read a bullish take on NFTs. It took almost a century for those baseball paper cards to be recognized as assets, but it only took 4 years for CryptoPunks to become the blue-chip status it has today. It didn’t take long for trading cards to become culturally relevant again, and despite the looming economic downturn, Trading Cards are still holding up pretty well.

The next tide for NFTs will only be bigger, and we are actively working with many industry partners to build the right infrastructure for its surge. NFT Trader, a trustless peer-to-peer OTC trading protocol, is our latest example of this industry partnership expansion. NFT Trader allows users to directly swap their NFTs, just like trading cards. However, unlike physical cards, which need the involvement of multiple parties to guarantee a fair trade, all swaps on NFT Trader happen on-chain with no 3rd party intervention. And to continue the analogy of trading cards, SPICYEST will play the role of grading companies like BGS or PSA on NFT Trader, by giving instant, real-time price updates, making the experience even more frictionless. The integration will come with NFT Trader’s next innovative update launching this fall, so stay tuned!

We are incredibly excited for the opportunity to work with NFT Trader, and this collaboration is only the tip of the iceberg of what we are working on. In the following months, we will announce more partners that use SPICYEST in many different ways. In the mean time, stay spicy!

@SPICYEST_NFT

@benschillin

If you’re into NFTs, it’s likely you’ve heard of the analogy “NFTs are like trading cards.”

And if you’re much deeper into NFTs, you might scoff at this analogy. “Pffff. But NFTs are so much more than just physical cards.” And you’re right. NFTs are a 1.8 trillion dollar industry, while trading cards are an estimated market of 1.3 billion. However, there are clear parallels between the history of the trading card industry and those of NFTs that shouldn’t go overlooked.

In fact, by learning about the boom and bust (and boom) cycle of trading cards, you’ll come to the realization that the next NFT bull run is simply no longer a matter of “if” but “when”. 👀

Let’s cover some basics: what are trading cards? They are a small card, usually made of paper, which contains an image of a certain person, place, or thing, meant as a prize or collectible. But what you probably didn’t know was how trading cards were around for almost a century before it became mainstream. In fact, the first trading cards weren’t even meant for trading! They were advertisements (i.e., ads for a business’s “trade”) and eventually pieces of paper they put in paper cigarette boxes to retain the shape of cigarettes. The first trading cards closest to its modern counterpart were baseball cards in the 1860s, still a century before things got exciting.

And like what blockchain did for NFTs, technological advancements laid the groundwork for trading cards to hit its first renaissance. Two prominent were color lithography (or multi color printing), which allowed companies to package these cards as prizes instead of placeholders, and television, which allowed fandoms to develop around sports and athletes beyond just baseball. The teenage baby boomers at the time bought and traded these popularized cards. But these cards mostly ended up discarded or used as bicycle spokes. They were just considered an afterthought, you know, like the prize you get from a McDonalds happy meal. It was only 30 years later when they blossomed into a real market.

We skip to the 1980s and see the fruits of technology and popularization of trading cards (and the scarcity of it) rise into a trading card frenzy. Investors and collectors alike began to recognize earlier trading cards as valuable assets. Old vintage cards (cards that were discarded or misused from decades ago) were sold by 20x to 100x multipliers! Baby boomers, fueled by FOMO, began buying and collecting cards again. Despite the market being highly speculative and disjointed, the early adaptors, enamored by the possibilities of profits, were eager to tell others to buy as many cards as they could. To give you an objective perspective of how popular cards were, by the early 1990s, the circulation of the Beckett price guide magazine had nearly 1M subscribers (by comparison, today’s Washington Post has 400k subscribers).

Everyone was looking for cards, believing that some of them will lead to generational wealth down the line. Sounds awfully familiar, no?

The 1990s should have been the golden years for trading cards. But after seeing the boom, companies began printing billions – yes billions (81 billion to be exact) – of trading cards. To make things worse, after the public learned of the hype and investment potential of cards, everyone started buying and holding, hoping the cards would appreciate, making them very illiquid. And long story short, the cultural phenomenon died off once the bought cards became useless by the 1990s. So useless that they were dumping and burning cards. Even today, cards from the 1990s are deemed worthless. The average age of card collectors and holders moved from 13 to 38 years old, with only maniacs and passionate collectors left to carry on “The Hobby.”

I'm condensing a toooon of history here, but for folks who have seen the highs and lows of the NFT market, the history of trading cards should sound very familiar. Swap certain words and phrases with NFT terms, and we are repeating the same story.

The earliest traded cards meant for cigarette boxes? They were simply the very first NFTs, like Colored Coins, which were meant to represent real world assets (ew), invented back in 2012. Replace lithography and TVs with Ethereum blockchain and ERC721 standardization, and we get the explosion of NFTs in 2018, similar to that of the trading card phenomena of the 1980s. Early adopting baby boomers are just today’s VCs and senior software developers with money to spend on their new digital hobby. And the oversaturation leading to the crash? Obviously I'm generalizing nuances, but there were about 17 million NFTs in circulation before 2019, compared to 52 million NFTs in circulation today.

Well, just like the earlier trading cards, the NFT market crashed. Uh, so what, are NFTs done for? Not quite. 30 years later, since the bust of trading cards, we witnessed another, even larger boom. A lot of folks point to COVID as the main reason for this resurgence of trading cards (lockdown + nostalgia). But this trivializes the technology and the players within the space that, yet again, laid the foundation for its continued growth. 

With the internet at play, trading cards were bought and sold at a different scale. Card producers, adapting from mistakes in the 1980s, have been meticulous about the number of cards they produce and drop, creating scarcity and fueling FOMO. Social media and marketing continue to drive interest in this market (think Logan Paul and his Charizard, or any viral unboxing videos you’ve seen). We now also have grading companies, like PSA and BGS, but also pricing and data analytic companies, all aimed to legitimize the value of these assets. There are trading card games like Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon, which are just as valuable, if not more profitable, than their sports counterparts. Back then, it was the salespeople going to conventions and doing TV commercials to sell their cards. Now, we have virtual marketplaces, buy-now-pay-later platforms, vaults, and fractional ownership of trading cards and sports memorabilia. The reason? They are all trying to bridge the gap between trading cards and finance, making the cards more liquid. We’re even witnessing NFT trading cards, where companies like NBA Top Shot or Candy Digital are taking traditional sports trading cards and turning them into NFTs!

I can’t even make this up. Almost identical players and financialization tools that keep the trading card space running are coming up in the NFT space, just at a much larger and complex scale. Card producers? Every new collection is almost a startup of its own, with their own dedicated team and roadmaps for users to see. And not to mention, each collection is meticulous about the number of whitelists and NFTs they release to maintain scarcity and demand. Social media and marketing? Twitter and memes are the name of the game, with virality considered one of the most important metrics. Pricing oracles? Check out your NFT’s spicy worth here! For marketplaces, we have OpenSea, LooksRare, and Magic Eden. And with blockchain technology, we have so many protocols and projects that are beginning to offer more market efficient solutions and products to users – all aimed to make NFTs more liquid.

These new developments should be exciting (we’ll go over these in an upcoming blog post about the ecosystem), especially putting into context the resurgence of trading cards. Trading cards didn’t die from a lack of interest in the 1990s; it was immature “card-nomics” (companies hyper-inflating card supply, with not much focus on tackling low liquidity) and lack of infrastructure (an authoritative source to register and look up cards and marketplaces to efficiently trade cards) that made cards eventually illiquid. Once these pain points were addressed in the modern day world with a variety of stakeholders to support the market, trading cards came roaring back. And the cool thing is, current stakeholders building in the NFT space, utilizing blockchain technologies, are focused on building out this infrastructure for NFTs as we speak – just at a much larger, complex scale!

By now, you have more knowledge than the general public about the history of trading cards. But alternatively, you’ve also read a bullish take on NFTs. It took almost a century for those baseball paper cards to be recognized as assets, but it only took 4 years for CryptoPunks to become the blue-chip status it has today. It didn’t take long for trading cards to become culturally relevant again, and despite the looming economic downturn, Trading Cards are still holding up pretty well.

The next tide for NFTs will only be bigger, and we are actively working with many industry partners to build the right infrastructure for its surge. NFT Trader, a trustless peer-to-peer OTC trading protocol, is our latest example of this industry partnership expansion. NFT Trader allows users to directly swap their NFTs, just like trading cards. However, unlike physical cards, which need the involvement of multiple parties to guarantee a fair trade, all swaps on NFT Trader happen on-chain with no 3rd party intervention. And to continue the analogy of trading cards, SPICYEST will play the role of grading companies like BGS or PSA on NFT Trader, by giving instant, real-time price updates, making the experience even more frictionless. The integration will come with NFT Trader’s next innovative update launching this fall, so stay tuned!

We are incredibly excited for the opportunity to work with NFT Trader, and this collaboration is only the tip of the iceberg of what we are working on. In the following months, we will announce more partners that use SPICYEST in many different ways. In the mean time, stay spicy!

@SPICYEST_NFT

@benschillin