Consider dusting out the shoe boxes in your attic filled with baseball cards; eBay may soon have a new home for some of them. The pioneering online marketplace site built a new 31,000-square-foot facility, called the eBay Vault, which is now open to house qualified trading cards that are valued at more than $750 and, in the future, physical collectibles of all kinds. The launch of eBay Vault comes on the heels of its Authenticity Assurance push, where it expanded from validating $100+ sneakers to partnering with Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) to qualify trading cards valued at over $2,000. eBay so far only accepts business cards purchased on their site that are already qualified by a list of reputable organizations such as PSA and Sportscard Guaranty Corporation. Unlike NFTs, you can remove and smell your aged cardboard cutout. Once a trading card purchase is made, the buyer can request that the trading card be sent to the eBay vault, where it will not only be stored but also available for resale without shipping the asset. . The benefit of this, says Dawn Block, eBay’s vice president of collectibles, is that it “will allow collectors to optimize and securely store their portfolio of assets” and also buy/sell in an instant as card values rise. and download in real time. The experience of buying and selling collectibles without even touching them is very crypto-adjacent. Digital assets like NFTs are not connected to anything physical, so investors can act on market changes in an instant without worrying about how long it takes to “move” the asset. Now, with eBay’s vault system, you can have the instant gratification of owning something physical that you don’t have closet space for. But unlike NFTs, you can pay eBay a fee to pick up your actual business card and send it to you (in-person visits to the vault are prohibited), so you can smell that aged cardboard cutout. eBay started selling NFTs about a year ago. (According to this FAQ, they are not eligible for vault storage, and unlike StockX, eBay is not producing NFT assets on the blockchain to link to stored items.) objects. While the pandemic revitalized the collectibles market and overwhelmed grading companies, eBay pushed for Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards easier, and now he hopes to take advantage of this new way of exchanging physical assets. Hopefully, it will catch on before supply saturation, but according to eBay, trading cards are still hot, with trading cards selling on average two units per second in the first quarter of 2022. No word yet on whether eBay’s vault will include classic video games, but it could get to the “$3 billion in assets” mark faster in its facilities by keeping graduate game carts.
