The index family

Nobody follows just one category. Someone who watches graded Pokémon has opinions about the neighboring shelves too: One Piece is heating up, vintage Magic is quiet, basketball rookies are anyone's guess. Each of those is a category, and the method that prices PKMN has nothing Pokémon-specific in it. It takes a category's real sales, selects the constituents that trade enough, cleans them, scales them and publishes one level. Point it at another category and it does the same.

A single index is a data point. A board of indexes, all built the same way, is infrastructure the hobby can lean on.

The board, with PKMN first to trade

The Quanta board carries 44 collectible indexes, all built with one method. Board levels and their full history come from Card Ladder sales data, refreshed daily, with every index starting at $1.00 in May 2004. The board covers card games (PKMN and its segments, MTG, YGO, OP, DBZ, plus the cross-game TCG50 and TCG83), sports (BSBL, BBAL, FTBL, HCKY, SOCR), eras (VNTG, MDRN, PRWR), licensed franchises (SWRS, MRVL, DSNY), and price and population tiers (HIEND, MDEND, LOEND, HIPOP, MDPOP, LOPOP), among others.

PKMN is the first tradable index, because graded Pokémon has the deepest on-chain sales record of any card category. On the largest on-chain vault for graded cards, Pokémon made up 256,373 of about 376,000 listed items, roughly 68% (public marketplace listings of one vaulting venue, as of 15 Sep 2026). Baseball, football and basketball followed with 27,978, 26,145 and 24,743 items, then One Piece with 13,249, Magic: The Gathering with 8,631 (part of it sealed boosters rather than graded singles) and Yu-Gi-Oh! with 160 (same source and date). More in PKMN, the first index.

The shape of that shelf shows where on-chain sales depth sits, and the same measurement that put PKMN first decides which board index trades next.

How a category earns an index

A category does not get an index for being popular. It gets one when its sales record can carry one: enough constituents (a card at a grade from a grader), each trading often enough, between enough distinct buyers and sellers, above a minimum value, for a median to mean something. Those are the selection principles in Methodology principles, applied with the same measurement to every category. The exact thresholds sit in each index's own published specification.

Nobody at Quanta decides by feel that One Piece is ready. The indexer runs over the category's record and finds enough qualifying constituents, and the index is published with its constituent list, its dictionary and its commitments. Every index on the board has cleared that bar, so no level on it is a number a handful of sales could push around.

Publishing costs compute and nothing more, so every category that clears the bar is published, traded or not. An index without a market is still a public price for a category that never had one.

How an index earns a market

Opening a market takes more than compute: liquidity on both sides, an insurance fund seeded before the first trade, and an oracle carrying the level to the matching engine. So markets open on the indexes people want to trade, and two signals show which those are. Demand: how many people follow an index's page and ask for its market. Depth: how thick the sales record behind the level is, because a market with leverage of up to 20x belongs on a level that is hard to move. What opening a market involves is covered in Market safeguards.

Published and tradable are two states of one index, not two products. The index page is the same in both: level, history, constituents, specification. On a tradable index the trade panel is live, and nothing else changes. What you see published is what you trade on The DEX, starting with /trade/PKMN.

Names and tickers

Every index has a ticker and a name. The ticker is uppercase and at most five characters; the name says in plain words what it tracks, such as Graded Pokémon. A segment deep enough to stand alone takes a suffix on its parent's ticker, PKMN-V for vintage, PKMN-M for modern and PKMN-U for ultra modern, and only when the segment's own data clears the same bar. A segment is never carved out for marketing.

Ticker	What it tracks
PKMN	Pokémon, the first tradable index
PKMN-V	Vintage Pokémon
PKMN-M	Modern Pokémon
PKMN-U	Ultra Modern Pokémon
MTG	Magic: The Gathering
YGO	Yu-Gi-Oh!
OP	One Piece
DBZ	Dragonball Z
BSBL	Baseball
BBAL	Basketball
FTBL	Football
HCKY	Hockey
SOCR	Soccer
VNTG	Vintage
MDRN	Modern
PRWR	Prewar Vintage
SWRS	Star Wars
MRVL	Marvel
DSNY	Disney
HIEND, MDEND, LOEND	High, mid and low price tiers
HIPOP, MDPOP, LOPOP	High, mid and low population tiers

The rest of the 44 follow the same conventions. Beyond cards carries them past cards, with tickers such as NKE50 and RLX20.

One code path

Every index runs on one code path. Adding a category means adding a configuration row: ticker, name, the filter the indexer applies to the record, a tradable flag and the market it maps to. No category has its own kind of selection rule, smoothing or exception list. The same rules run everywhere, and the parameters they take are set per index and published in its specification.

We chose that constraint for trust. An index that can be hand-tuned per category can be tuned in someone's favor, and a reader would have no way to tell. The only thing that differs between PKMN and its neighbors is the specification each one carries, and that is public and versioned. When a category calls for different behavior, the change goes into the method for every index, never into a carve-out for one.

The result is a board that grows without turning into a pile of special cases. Where the same method goes past cards is on Beyond cards; where the whole plan goes next is on the Roadmap.

Sources for this page are listed in Sources.