Chester Ng 🆖

🆖 tweets on founding/funding companies as GP @JoinAtomic. We make Exowatt, Golden Child, $HIMS, Homebound, Replicant, etc. Also ❤️🏀 cards & #ClipperNation

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

I've spent a bit too much of my evenings and weekends thinking about the card market lately, both as a collector and investor fascinated by the business. As a record-shattering summer wraps up, a few observations:

1. The market is much bigger - and growing much faster - than most people realize. Online marketplace sales of cards surpassed $900M in Aug alone (via @CardLadder), 5x+ the peak during the pandemic and 2x+ since the beginning of this year. And that doesn't even include the massive offline market across shops, shows, and private sales. Nor does it include perhaps the fastest growing channel, live shopping. @Whatnot recently raised $545M at a $20B valuation after doing $8B GMV in H1 2026 which equaled their entire 2025. Even @eBay itself grew 67% y-o-y in H1 2026 to $1.36B of card sales, and they're a dinosaur. Cards aren't having a covid comeback, they've blown through covid.

2. The demographic tailwinds are perfectly set up for this moment. The kids who grew up on Pokémon, Magic, video games, and internet culture are entering their prime wealth-creation years. No offense but: the nerds got rich. Then enter @michaelrubin @mikemahan @Fanatics to make card collecting mainstream and cool, and now the nerds become both rich and cool.

3. The collector base is expanding, by gender and geography. TCG has done wonders in bringing women into the market: trading cards were the #1 secondhand category purchased by Gen Z women on eBay in 2025. I visited the SF Card Show this weekend and it was a far cry from the dude fest card shows I grew up with. While some sports like soccer and basketball are largely global, most fandom has geographic boundaries. But TCG literally has no boundaries. Pikachu is Pikachu in Tokyo, London, Paris, São Paulo, or San Francisco.

4. The infrastructure is finally catching up to the market. Marketplaces. Live commerce. Grading. Authentication. Vaulting. Custody. Data. Analytics. Portfolio Management. @PSAcard's grading backlog peaked at ~14M cards in June, which shows how the demand is forcing the infrastructure to find a way to keep pace. What's emerging is less like just infrastructure for a niche hobby and more like infrastructure for an alternative asset class.

5. Innovation is accelerating. @Topps Instant Rips backed by physical cards. Digital repacks. Instant buybacks. Break-to-grade-to-vault streamlined. Computer vision and AI-assisted authentication and grading. Real-time portfolio tracking. The entrepreneur in me looks at all this and knows we're just scratching the surface here.

6. Cards are becoming entertainment. People watch card breaks they aren't even buying into. Whatnot hosts 550,000+ hours of live shows every week. @netflix's King of Collectibles @KenGoldin is on Season 3 now. The transaction itself has become the content.

7. And yes, cards are now an alternative asset class. The Pokemon @CardLadder index returned ~3,800% from 2004-2025 vs. ~480% for the S&P 500 according to WSJ, which even beat Meta since its IPO. And this was reported before the 2026 boom. I even heard recently from a trusted source that a blue chip top tier asset management firm is launching a card hedge fund soon. Obviously, cardboard != equities. But long-term returns like these will continue to attract capital.

8. None of this means the market will only continue to go up. In fact, a correction feels likely - and may be overdue. Manufacturers will overprint. Speculation has outrun collecting in places. Breaks and repacks blur the line between collecting and gambling. Large markets growing 100%+ annually eventually slow down. And mo money mo problems.

But zooming out, what fascinates me is the transition happening in real time: from hobby to market to ecosystem. It feels like the card market has a credible path to $100B+ and relatively to its size, growth, and engagement, it still feels remarkably nascent with a ton of opportunity ahead.

What do you think? And more importantly, what do you collect?

[Ja’dan Johnson @jdanjohnson]

Some personal news: my startup, Stationed, was acquired by @terminalio.

It's pretty surreal to see something I started turn into an opportunity to build on a much bigger scale.

I'm now leading Terminal AI, and we're just getting started.

Still hiring engineers in Miami and remotely!

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

yep same! I think a mix of 1) diminishing returns - they GSD a lot so maybe my to-do list got whittled down? (wishful thinking) 2) increasing blocks - running into more walls e.g. Amazon, OpenTable, Hyatt, CardLadder 3) novelty wearing off

I recently felt this so had Instinct audit outstanding tasks, standing ongoing tasks, new tasks we should consider, tasks we should wind down / give up

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@JamCristopher A+ tweet. Ugh 😩

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@itsgeoffwilson Same. 🤯 This isn’t going to end well.

[Charlie Reverte @charlie_reverte]

AI is a great co-pilot. But it’s a terrible salesperson. So we’re going old school, with a twist.

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@CardPurchaser If it looks anything like Photogenic and OG TSC, then I'm in! If it looks like all of these other trash watered down Topps SKUs they keep releasing, then nah. Can't wait to see what they do with Beam Team

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@Topps Let's see what you got, @Topps. Panini out Stadium Club'ed Stadium Club with Photogenic. Stunning photos - one of my all-time fav underrated products. Hope you bring it with this release!

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@hpierrejacques what was the fav stop and treatment of the tour?

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@skunkapecards Yeah not crazy about the mix of college + women’s. Modern junk wax imo.

Ripped 10 of those Megas and luckily hit this @AJ_Dybantsa so at least covered my costs for once

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

Yes I have assistant burnout. Yes I'm trying Hark. Yes I actually like it at first blush.

Slick interface, fast, organizing by Projects is nice, browser agent works and I like the visual, Panels (mini apps) are cool too. But I haven't found yet something it can do that the others can't. In fact it already failed at one head to head task for me vs. Instinct.

Wdyt so far?

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Introducing Hark Pro

Hark Pro is now live on web, iOS, and Android

Try it free: https://t.co/sco2fEKPQD

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@davidrgoldberg we all had the same idea and as such, https://t.co/CDFSOao40g ofc crashed at exactly 1p

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@davidrgoldberg Most have the card vending machines now. And all will soon via @CardVaultTB 💪

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@skunkapecards Just posted the sequel to that 1st one. Lmk what you think: https://t.co/qF8ERv1DVC

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

It's been a month since I wrote some words here about cardboard. I explained why the card market had just wrapped a record-shattering summer and how the transition from hobby to ecosystem was accelerating towards a $100B+ market. I may have completely underestimated the pace and trajectory.

1. This may be the new normal. Sep online marketplace sales printed at ~$950M (via @CardLadder) which completely bucked the historical seasonal September dip. A billion-dollar month has gone from eye-popping to almost expected. And again, this is only a proxy as it doesn't include the massive offline market, live shopping like @Whatnot, digital packs (see below), private sales.

2. The collector acquisition funnel has been blown wide open. @coinbase just surprised the industry by announcing that users will be able to rip packs of physical-backed cards directly in their app, then vault, ship, or sell back what they pull. Coinbase. The platform with $246B of assets from 115M registered users worldwide. They tout that they're the "Everything Exchange" and @brian_armstrong sees cards as much an "everything" as crypto and stocks.

But if you double click here, the digital repack trend is driving this market expansion. Admittedly I didn't fully get this last month, until I tried ripping a repack (or two or ten) myself and saw some of my n00b friends quickly turn collector after getting hooked by apps like @RipsByTriumph (top 10 US shopping app now), @Trovexyz, and my friend @Duke_Chung (the 🐐)'s https://t.co/N9J7RpsGXT.

But there are real risks with this trend to consider. This model leans heavily on degen gambling mechanics. The funnel expansion brings in collectors, but also gamblers, speculators, and tourists. Repacks appear to be gobbling up supply, inflating prices, jamming up @PSAcard grading lines (godspeed @natsturner) and introducing some of the similar behavior we saw inflate and pop the NFT bubble just a few years ago. Rumor has it (via @BosCardHunter) that Coinbase is utilizing a large network of vendors to buy out show inventory with an unlimited budget.

Some of the same forces making cards more mainstream can also make the market more fragile. Tread carefully.

3. Pokemon is on its way to becoming king (or maybe already is). @the27guy pointed out that the 59 highest priced cards on the @Fanatics @Collect auction were Pokemon.🤯 And the non-sports spillover is hard to ignore. None of this is for me personally (not interested in any of it), but after seeing friends go all-in on @Disney @Topps cards I noticed that a Mickey Mouse Superfractor sold just last week for $222k. What kind of Mickey Mouse sh*t is that?!

4. The physical hobby is expanding in lockstep with the digital. @CardVaultTB @TomBrady is opening stores at a furious pace, up to 19 now. Even in (what I consider) a second-tier card market South Florida, there are four overlapping shows just this weekend including the large Courtside Card Show in downtown Miami. I've been to a handful of shows and shops over the past month and they are ALL packed to the brim. For all the innovation happening online, collectors still want to see cards IRL, haggle over them, show them off, and buy/sell/trade IRL.

5. Oh, and Cooper Flagg sold for $8.04m. A 19-year-old who has only played in 70 NBA games saw his 1/1 NBA Debut Patch Auto auction for $8.04m after it was pulled in a $515 livestream break in August. The reaction was exactly as you'd expect, from @mdudas stating that nobody is paying $8m for this card organically in the year of our lord 2026 to @itsgeoffwilson arguing that if @Cooper_Flagg goes on to have a 🐐 career, this could look like a bargain compared to Jordan, Mantle, and Picasso. The real story here is how a card that did not exist a few months ago could be pulled publicly, go viral, establish provenance, find global liquidity and turn into an $8M asset almost immediately.

So what's next? This has to be top, right? Right? Many have been calling top for almost a year now. There will be a correction at some point. Since I can't predict when, the more interesting question is what the market looks like on the other side of it. If the collector base is significantly larger, the acquisition funnel is much wider, physical retail and shows dramatically expanded and cards are now an "Everything" category, then the baseline could end up in a different stratosphere than any of us ever expected.

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@skunkapecards 💯

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

I've spent a bit too much of my evenings and weekends thinking about the card market lately, both as a collector and investor fascinated by the business. As a record-shattering summer wraps up, a few observations:

1. The market is much bigger - and growing much faster - than most people realize. Online marketplace sales of cards surpassed $900M in Aug alone (via @CardLadder), 5x+ the peak during the pandemic and 2x+ since the beginning of this year. And that doesn't even include the massive offline market across shops, shows, and private sales. Nor does it include perhaps the fastest growing channel, live shopping. @Whatnot recently raised $545M at a $20B valuation after doing $8B GMV in H1 2026 which equaled their entire 2025. Even @eBay itself grew 67% y-o-y in H1 2026 to $1.36B of card sales, and they're a dinosaur. Cards aren't having a covid comeback, they've blown through covid.

2. The demographic tailwinds are perfectly set up for this moment. The kids who grew up on Pokémon, Magic, video games, and internet culture are entering their prime wealth-creation years. No offense but: the nerds got rich. Then enter @michaelrubin @mikemahan @Fanatics to make card collecting mainstream and cool, and now the nerds become both rich and cool.

3. The collector base is expanding, by gender and geography. TCG has done wonders in bringing women into the market: trading cards were the #1 secondhand category purchased by Gen Z women on eBay in 2025. I visited the SF Card Show this weekend and it was a far cry from the dude fest card shows I grew up with. While some sports like soccer and basketball are largely global, most fandom has geographic boundaries. But TCG literally has no boundaries. Pikachu is Pikachu in Tokyo, London, Paris, São Paulo, or San Francisco.

4. The infrastructure is finally catching up to the market. Marketplaces. Live commerce. Grading. Authentication. Vaulting. Custody. Data. Analytics. Portfolio Management. @PSAcard's grading backlog peaked at ~14M cards in June, which shows how the demand is forcing the infrastructure to find a way to keep pace. What's emerging is less like just infrastructure for a niche hobby and more like infrastructure for an alternative asset class.

5. Innovation is accelerating. @Topps Instant Rips backed by physical cards. Digital repacks. Instant buybacks. Break-to-grade-to-vault streamlined. Computer vision and AI-assisted authentication and grading. Real-time portfolio tracking. The entrepreneur in me looks at all this and knows we're just scratching the surface here.

6. Cards are becoming entertainment. People watch card breaks they aren't even buying into. Whatnot hosts 550,000+ hours of live shows every week. @netflix's King of Collectibles @KenGoldin is on Season 3 now. The transaction itself has become the content.

7. And yes, cards are now an alternative asset class. The Pokemon @CardLadder index returned ~3,800% from 2004-2025 vs. ~480% for the S&P 500 according to WSJ, which even beat Meta since its IPO. And this was reported before the 2026 boom. I even heard recently from a trusted source that a blue chip top tier asset management firm is launching a card hedge fund soon. Obviously, cardboard != equities. But long-term returns like these will continue to attract capital.

8. None of this means the market will only continue to go up. In fact, a correction feels likely - and may be overdue. Manufacturers will overprint. Speculation has outrun collecting in places. Breaks and repacks blur the line between collecting and gambling. Large markets growing 100%+ annually eventually slow down. And mo money mo problems.

But zooming out, what fascinates me is the transition happening in real time: from hobby to market to ecosystem. It feels like the card market has a credible path to $100B+ and relatively to its size, growth, and engagement, it still feels remarkably nascent with a ton of opportunity ahead.

What do you think? And more importantly, what do you collect?

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@gaganbiyani @vsodera What’s your take on the Why?

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

Also, whoa… pacing at 2x $100k Pokémon card sales a day now

[Will Stern @Will__Stern]

Pokémon $100K+ card sales by year:

2020: 7
2021: 20
2022: 16
2023: 18
2024: 30
2025: 45
2026: 381 (thru Sept.)

2026 pace: ~509

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

It's been a month since I wrote some words here about cardboard. I explained why the card market had just wrapped a record-shattering summer and how the transition from hobby to ecosystem was accelerating towards a $100B+ market. I may have completely underestimated the pace and trajectory.

1. This may be the new normal. Sep online marketplace sales printed at ~$950M (via @CardLadder) which completely bucked the historical seasonal September dip. A billion-dollar month has gone from eye-popping to almost expected. And again, this is only a proxy as it doesn't include the massive offline market, live shopping like @Whatnot, digital packs (see below), private sales.

2. The collector acquisition funnel has been blown wide open. @coinbase just surprised the industry by announcing that users will be able to rip packs of physical-backed cards directly in their app, then vault, ship, or sell back what they pull. Coinbase. The platform with $246B of assets from 115M registered users worldwide. They tout that they're the "Everything Exchange" and @brian_armstrong sees cards as much an "everything" as crypto and stocks.

But if you double click here, the digital repack trend is driving this market expansion. Admittedly I didn't fully get this last month, until I tried ripping a repack (or two or ten) myself and saw some of my n00b friends quickly turn collector after getting hooked by apps like @RipsByTriumph (top 10 US shopping app now), @Trovexyz, and my friend @Duke_Chung (the 🐐)'s https://t.co/N9J7RpsGXT.

But there are real risks with this trend to consider. This model leans heavily on degen gambling mechanics. The funnel expansion brings in collectors, but also gamblers, speculators, and tourists. Repacks appear to be gobbling up supply, inflating prices, jamming up @PSAcard grading lines (godspeed @natsturner) and introducing some of the similar behavior we saw inflate and pop the NFT bubble just a few years ago. Rumor has it (via @BosCardHunter) that Coinbase is utilizing a large network of vendors to buy out show inventory with an unlimited budget.

Some of the same forces making cards more mainstream can also make the market more fragile. Tread carefully.

3. Pokemon is on its way to becoming king (or maybe already is). @the27guy pointed out that the 59 highest priced cards on the @Fanatics @Collect auction were Pokemon.🤯 And the non-sports spillover is hard to ignore. None of this is for me personally (not interested in any of it), but after seeing friends go all-in on @Disney @Topps cards I noticed that a Mickey Mouse Superfractor sold just last week for $222k. What kind of Mickey Mouse sh*t is that?!

4. The physical hobby is expanding in lockstep with the digital. @CardVaultTB @TomBrady is opening stores at a furious pace, up to 19 now. Even in (what I consider) a second-tier card market South Florida, there are four overlapping shows just this weekend including the large Courtside Card Show in downtown Miami. I've been to a handful of shows and shops over the past month and they are ALL packed to the brim. For all the innovation happening online, collectors still want to see cards IRL, haggle over them, show them off, and buy/sell/trade IRL.

5. Oh, and Cooper Flagg sold for $8.04m. A 19-year-old who has only played in 70 NBA games saw his 1/1 NBA Debut Patch Auto auction for $8.04m after it was pulled in a $515 livestream break in August. The reaction was exactly as you'd expect, from @mdudas stating that nobody is paying $8m for this card organically in the year of our lord 2026 to @itsgeoffwilson arguing that if @Cooper_Flagg goes on to have a 🐐 career, this could look like a bargain compared to Jordan, Mantle, and Picasso. The real story here is how a card that did not exist a few months ago could be pulled publicly, go viral, establish provenance, find global liquidity and turn into an $8M asset almost immediately.

So what's next? This has to be top, right? Right? Many have been calling top for almost a year now. There will be a correction at some point. Since I can't predict when, the more interesting question is what the market looks like on the other side of it. If the collector base is significantly larger, the acquisition funnel is much wider, physical retail and shows dramatically expanded and cards are now an "Everything" category, then the baseline could end up in a different stratosphere than any of us ever expected.

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@davidrgoldberg Yes and yes
https://t.co/qF8ERv2bLa

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

It's been a month since I wrote some words here about cardboard. I explained why the card market had just wrapped a record-shattering summer and how the transition from hobby to ecosystem was accelerating towards a $100B+ market. I may have completely underestimated the pace and trajectory.

1. This may be the new normal. Sep online marketplace sales printed at ~$950M (via @CardLadder) which completely bucked the historical seasonal September dip. A billion-dollar month has gone from eye-popping to almost expected. And again, this is only a proxy as it doesn't include the massive offline market, live shopping like @Whatnot, digital packs (see below), private sales.

2. The collector acquisition funnel has been blown wide open. @coinbase just surprised the industry by announcing that users will be able to rip packs of physical-backed cards directly in their app, then vault, ship, or sell back what they pull. Coinbase. The platform with $246B of assets from 115M registered users worldwide. They tout that they're the "Everything Exchange" and @brian_armstrong sees cards as much an "everything" as crypto and stocks.

But if you double click here, the digital repack trend is driving this market expansion. Admittedly I didn't fully get this last month, until I tried ripping a repack (or two or ten) myself and saw some of my n00b friends quickly turn collector after getting hooked by apps like @RipsByTriumph (top 10 US shopping app now), @Trovexyz, and my friend @Duke_Chung (the 🐐)'s https://t.co/N9J7RpsGXT.

But there are real risks with this trend to consider. This model leans heavily on degen gambling mechanics. The funnel expansion brings in collectors, but also gamblers, speculators, and tourists. Repacks appear to be gobbling up supply, inflating prices, jamming up @PSAcard grading lines (godspeed @natsturner) and introducing some of the similar behavior we saw inflate and pop the NFT bubble just a few years ago. Rumor has it (via @BosCardHunter) that Coinbase is utilizing a large network of vendors to buy out show inventory with an unlimited budget.

Some of the same forces making cards more mainstream can also make the market more fragile. Tread carefully.

3. Pokemon is on its way to becoming king (or maybe already is). @the27guy pointed out that the 59 highest priced cards on the @Fanatics @Collect auction were Pokemon.🤯 And the non-sports spillover is hard to ignore. None of this is for me personally (not interested in any of it), but after seeing friends go all-in on @Disney @Topps cards I noticed that a Mickey Mouse Superfractor sold just last week for $222k. What kind of Mickey Mouse sh*t is that?!

4. The physical hobby is expanding in lockstep with the digital. @CardVaultTB @TomBrady is opening stores at a furious pace, up to 19 now. Even in (what I consider) a second-tier card market South Florida, there are four overlapping shows just this weekend including the large Courtside Card Show in downtown Miami. I've been to a handful of shows and shops over the past month and they are ALL packed to the brim. For all the innovation happening online, collectors still want to see cards IRL, haggle over them, show them off, and buy/sell/trade IRL.

5. Oh, and Cooper Flagg sold for $8.04m. A 19-year-old who has only played in 70 NBA games saw his 1/1 NBA Debut Patch Auto auction for $8.04m after it was pulled in a $515 livestream break in August. The reaction was exactly as you'd expect, from @mdudas stating that nobody is paying $8m for this card organically in the year of our lord 2026 to @itsgeoffwilson arguing that if @Cooper_Flagg goes on to have a 🐐 career, this could look like a bargain compared to Jordan, Mantle, and Picasso. The real story here is how a card that did not exist a few months ago could be pulled publicly, go viral, establish provenance, find global liquidity and turn into an $8M asset almost immediately.

So what's next? This has to be top, right? Right? Many have been calling top for almost a year now. There will be a correction at some point. Since I can't predict when, the more interesting question is what the market looks like on the other side of it. If the collector base is significantly larger, the acquisition funnel is much wider, physical retail and shows dramatically expanded and cards are now an "Everything" category, then the baseline could end up in a different stratosphere than any of us ever expected.

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@skunkapecards I know this. We all know this. Yet I/we can't help it. Alas, it is a problem.🤪

[Chester Ng 🆖 @chest]

@mvanhorn Love that you did this. I've had multiple instances where I've felt like Instinct was smarter than others, but haven't measured it systematically so has been purely anecdotal.