If you were born in the late 90s or early 2000s, there’s a decent chance your earliest speculative behavior came wrapped in shiny foil with an assortment of peculiar-looking creatures plastered over the packaging. Whether it started with Red and Blue on the Game Boy, the animated TV series (still running today), or trading random cards at school, the franchise has long been a gateway to collection-based engagement. At its core, it was speculation, just small-scale and analog.

Back then, the value of a card was primarily sentimental. Few kids had the foresight (or preservation habits) to treat these as long-term assets. A couple of decades later, Pokémon stands at the top of the list of highest-grossing franchises, with over $90B in cumulative revenue, and represents a core part of a collectibles market worth between $6B and $7B. We’re now in the midst of another period of intense speculation, and this time, blockchain infrastructure is quietly making collecting more accessible, more liquid, and arguably more engaging. Below, we’ll explore how a new generation of Pokémon-focused marketplaces is gamifying access to some of the most soug