Coinbase teases Pokémon card packs backed by physical collectibles

Coinbase just did something that would make every 90s kid’s inner child lose composure. The exchange teased a feature that lets users rip open Pokémon card packs on their phones, with every single pull backed by an actual, physical card sitting in a vault somewhere.

“Rip packs on your phone. Every pull backed by a real, physical card. Vault it or ship it,” the company wrote on X on September 28. It’s a sentence that somehow bridges the gap between a childhood hobby and a publicly traded crypto company’s product roadmap.

What Coinbase is building

The concept is straightforward, even if the execution is anything but. Users will be able to open digital Pokémon card packs through Coinbase, and each card revealed on screen corresponds 1:1 with a real physical card. After the digital rip, collectors face a choice: keep the card vaulted in secure storage, or have it shipped to their doorstep.

This isn’t Coinbase’s first dance with physical-backed digital collectibles. Back in May 2024, Coinbase Wallet integrated with Courtyard, a platform that lets users mint tokenized versions of physical Pokémon cards. Those physical cards were stored at Brink’s, the armored truck company that’s been moving valuables since 1859. The integration included digital reveals and automatic buyback options, giving collectors a taste of what a fully digitized trading card market might look like.

The new teaser suggests Coinbase is taking things further, bringing pack-opening mechanics directly into its own ecosystem rather than relying solely on third-party integrations. No launch date, pricing structure, or fee details were included in the announcement.

Why Pokémon cards, and why now

The Pokémon trading card market has been on a tear for years. What started as a children’s game in the late 1990s has evolved into a serious collectibles market that’s approaching multibillion-dollar territory. A PSA-graded first edition holographic Charizard can sell for six figures. Even mid-tier vintage cards regularly trade for thousands.

But the physical card market has problems that crypto infrastructure is uniquely suited to solve. Authentication is expensive and slow. Storage requires either a fireproof safe or a prayer. Liquidity is terrible, with sellers often waiting weeks on eBay or at conventions to find the right buyer. And the pack-ripping experience, the dopamine hit that drives the entire hobby, is limited to whoever can find sealed product at retail or pay a premium on the secondary market.

Tokenizing cards and storing them in professional vaults addresses most of these pain points in one move. Ownership transfers happen on-chain in seconds. The physical cards stay in climate-controlled security. And the pack-ripping experience gets digitized in a way that’s accessible to anyone with a phone, not just people willing to drive to a card shop.

The broader tokenized collectibles trend

Courtyard, the platform Coinbase previously integrated with, has been a pioneer in this niche. Its model of grading, vaulting, and tokenizing physical cards demonstrated that the concept works at a technical level.

The model also raises interesting questions about how traditional collectibles companies will respond. The Pokémon Company, which controls licensing for the franchise, hasn’t publicly commented on Coinbase’s teaser. Any large-scale tokenization of Pokémon products would presumably require some level of coordination with or at least tolerance from the rights holders.