The Solana-based tokenised card marketplace Phygitals announced an integration with Fanatics Collect, the world's second-largest sports collectibles platform behind eBay.
Collectors who list a card on Phygitals can now select Fanatics Collect as an additional selling venue in one click. Phygitals went live on Fanatics with 50,000+ cards already cross-listed at launch.
This is the first time a crypto-native trading card marketplace has plugged directly into a mainstream sports collectibles platform of this scale.
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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:
1) The Integration 🔗
2) The Market 📊
3) B2B Infrastructure 🏗️
4) Concluding Thoughts 💭
Before we get into things…
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🔗 The Integration
The product integration is very simple. List once on Phygitals, sell across both marketplaces.
A collector with a vaulted card on Phygitals can now expose that listing to Fanatics Collect's buyer base without having to recreate it.
Fanatics handles regular payments in fiat
Phygitals handles the onchain side logistics
The card stays in its vault
Only the listing moves
The Fanatics Collect digital platform only launched in Summer 2024, but it’s added fuel to the fire of a monster collectibles business.
1.1 million cards were securely stored in Fanatics vault in 2025
13 cards sold for > $1m in 2025
85% US-focused
Collectibles hit $1.6bn in revenue in 2024 for Fanatics
They just announced they’re taking World Cup rights from 2031 onwards, ending Panini’s 60+ year association with the biggest tournament in sport
Phygitals has done $180 million+ in trading volume on Solana since its public beta in February 2024. The team is lean, with six or seven people and the company have not raised any external funding.
The integration sits atop a vaulting stack that the two companies already share.
Phygitals' cards are physically stored across PSA, Alt XYZ, and Fanatics' own facilities.
That existing custody overlap is what makes the cross-listing possible. The card is already inside the system.
Phygitals is also building proof of reserves with Alt XYZ, the firm that runs the dominant trading card pricing oracle. Any user will be able to view a Phygitals profile and verify the cards in vault.
📊 The Market
The onchain collectibles category has quietly become the biggest consumer crypto story outside of prediction markets.
The weekly revenue (net of buybacks) across major platforms is at all time highs, and is up 3x in the last 18 months.

Gacha spending (buying digital packs) is also at all time highs across major platforms, ~4x YoY, which is remarkable.

Weekly volumes have also become significant, seeing 3.5-4x YoY growth.

Looking at phygitals in isolation, the numbers make for interesting reading.

In Sep 2025, Phygitals saw explosive growth: $21m Volume peak / $11m Gacha peak / $1.46m Net Revenue peak, all in the week of Sep 29. This was a sharp rise following much more modest metrics in mid 2025.
Following that dip, Phygitals saw a dip in Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, before growing in linear fashion across all metrics toward the end of Q1 and Q2 2026.
Phygitals' Real Pitch: B2B Infrastructure 🏗️
The headline reads like a B2C marketplace story. The actual business is increasingly a B2B one.
Jake Vito, CEO of Phygitals, framing on the get infinity podcast was the following:
"We have a focus on the consumer side, but we're also equally focused on the B2B side, distributing our tech and everything we've built to others.”
Indeed, there is a lack of differentiation currently within the digital onchain gacha business.
As per Vito:
"These gacha platforms are pretty much commoditised. So we want to be the ones powering these platforms versus head-to-head competing."
The Fanatics integration is the most visible version of that. But the same logic is showing up across the rest of the partner stack. Phygitals is powering Anime Chain and over 30 branded pack drops from creators including Zardo Cards (the million-follower Pokémon shop), Vlog, and Nuco. Some of those drops have sold out tens of thousands of units in a single launch.
Concluding Thoughts 💭
(1) Wrapper or Business model innovation?
Until now, my feeling has been the collectibles industry has viewed tokenised trading cards as a wrapper, not as a business model innovation. I think that is a mistake. Fanatics are the first big player in this space, but are certainly not the last.
eBay and secondary marketplaces like Vinted will all be looking at this space seriously in the future
(2) Liquidity is powerful
Phygitals now has two marketplaces feeding a single book. A card listed once is exposed to both the Solana-native bid and the 140 million Fanatics customers at the same time.
For Fanatics Collect, this is a win-win. They are able to add more inventory, completely turnkey. For Phygitals, it’s a huge coup due to the credibility the Fanatics brand lends them.
(3) Secondary sales win out
Phygitals' inventory is mostly Pokémon, One Piece, and other TCG categories. The integration covers cards that Fanatics doesn't have exclusive licensing on.
Being able to monetise cards that don’t require Fanatics to fork out big licensing fees for is a higher margin product. Of course they are investing massively there, but being able to aggregate more and more inventory for your customers on the secondary market is vital to win in this game.
(4) Competition or Cooperation
When Robinhood launched prediction markets, they used Kalshi as the conduit.
They then acquired an exchange and started building out the plumbing themselves.
If this gets big enough for Fanatics Collect, I wonder whether we could see an acquisition, or them building something.
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