The eBay vault protects physical trading cards so you can buy and sell them digitally

Consider dusting your attic shoe boxes full of baseball cards; eBay may have a new home for some of them soon. The pioneering online marketplace has built a new 31,000-square-foot facility called eBay Vault, which is now open to store classified merchant cards valued at more than $ 750 and, in the future, physical collectibles of all kinds.

The launch of eBay Vault comes hotly after its push for a guarantee of authenticity, where it has expanded from validating sneakers over $ 100 to partnering with a Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) to ranking commercial cards over $ 2,000. For the time being, eBay only accepts merchant cards purchased on their site that are already rated by a list of reputable organizations such as PSA and Sportscard Guaranty Corporation.

Once a merchant card purchase has taken place, the buyer can send the merchant card to the eBay vault, where it will not only be stored but also available for resale without sending the asset around. The benefit of this, Dawn Block, eBay’s vice president of collectibles, says it will “allow collectors to streamline and secure their asset portfolio” as well as buy / sell for a moment when card values ​​rise and fall. in real time.

The experience of buying and selling collectibles without touching them at all is very close to crypto. Digital assets such as NFT are not physically linked, so investors can act on market changes for a moment without worrying about the time it takes to “move” the asset.

Now, with eBay’s vault system, you can get instant gratification from owning something physical that you don’t have in your closet. But unlike NFT, you can pay eBay a fee to download your actual merchant card and send it to you (personal visits to the vault are prohibited) so you can smell this outdated cardboard cutout.

eBay started selling NFT about a year ago. (According to this frequently asked question, they do not qualify for vault storage and, unlike StockX, eBay does not produce NFT assets in the blockchain to associate with stored items.) But the company has worked even harder to ensures that buyers receive authentic physical objects. As the pandemic boosted the collectibles market and overwhelmed ranking companies, eBay insisted on making a list of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards easier and now hopes to cash in on this new way to transfer physical assets. Hopefully it will succeed before the supply is saturated, but according to eBay, merchant cards are still hot, with merchant cards selling at an average of two units per second in the first quarter of 2022. There is still no question of whether the eBay vault will feature classic video games, but could reach the $ 3 billion in assets brand at its facilities faster by sticking to classified game carts.