A world first

Claims of being first are cheap in crypto and cheaper still in collectibles, so ours arrives with every qualifier spelled out. For the first time, a whole category of physical collectibles has one live price you can trade, long or short, built from real sales. Each word in that sentence is there for a reason, and each one marks a line no earlier project crossed.

The claim, word by word

The first tradable indexes on physical collectibles, priced from real sales.

Tradable sets Quanta apart from the card indexes published for years that nobody could take a position on. Physical sets it apart from the NFT index perpetuals of 2023, which priced digital collections from their floor listings. Real sales sets it apart from venues that price cards from scraped marketplace pages: a listing is what a seller hopes to get, a scraped figure is whatever a page showed that minute, and a completed sale is what a buyer actually paid. And live, whenever the claim is about a market, sets it apart from a Pokémon index perpetual that never left its testnet.

Put simply: the first index on graded trading cards you can trade, live, on-chain, long or short. All three qualifiers, live, on-chain and long or short, stay in the claim.

What existed before

An index perpetual on digital collectibles

Hyperliquid listed NFTI-USD on 29 November 2023: a perpetual on an index of six blue-chip NFT collections, calculated as a three-minute exponential moving average of their combined floor prices and presented as an easy way to long or short the NFT market (Hyperliquid, Nov 2023). It was delisted on 27 June 2024 and open positions were settled at the mark price (Hyperliquid, Jun 2024). It priced digital items from the lowest ask in each collection: nothing physical, nothing settled.

An index perpetual that stayed on testnet

Trove Markets designed POKE-USDC, a perpetual on a Pokémon card index priced from data scraped off marketplace and price guide sites (eBay, TCGplayer and others) with a smoothing average, and promoted itself as the world's first collectibles perpdex (Trove Markets, 2025). It ran a public beta on a testnet in late 2025 and announced a move to Solana in January 2026 (The Block, Jan 2026). When we checked in September 2026, we found no verifiable launch with real money. A testnet market is a demo: no liquidity to defend, no funding to pay, no liquidation to get through.

Perpetuals on single cards

Several venues list perpetuals on individual cards. One of them, Pokeliquid, calls itself The first on-chain perpetual futures DEX for Pokémon TCG products: over 67 markets on single cards and sealed products, up to 25x, priced from TCGplayer data fetched every five minutes (Pokeliquid docs, Sep 2026). That is a different product. A perpetual on one Charizard is not a perpetual on graded Pokémon as a whole; trading it still means choosing the card, now with leverage added.

Indexes you could read but never trade

Card Ladder launched on 23 June 2020 (Card Ladder, as of 15 Sep 2026; Sports Collectors Digest, Dec 2021) and indexes the market: it publishes an index for every major card category, recalculated each night from public sales (Card Ladder Help Center, Jan 2023), as data for reading. The watch indexes from WatchCharts and Chrono24, and StockX's Hype Index, work the same way (as of Sep 2026). None of them could be traded. Quanta takes that data and makes it tradable: the 44-index Quanta board runs on Card Ladder sales data, and Quanta turns those category levels into markets you can take a position on, starting with PKMN. How the data fits together is on The data source.

Three things, together for the first time

Every piece of Quanta existed somewhere. The combination did not.

The underlying is physical and graded. Every constituent is a real card in a slab, at a specific grade from a specific grader.

The price is built from completed sales. Not asking prices, not floor listings, not appraisals. Board levels and history come from Card Ladder's record of graded card sales across the major marketplaces and auction houses, and the public on-chain record of vaulted cards sold for USDC, each with a price, a timestamp and both parties, gives the index engine a settlement layer anyone can verify. The engine picks constituents by liquidity, uses medians, removes trades that look like manipulation and keeps an archive so a third party can recompute the level; the reasoning is in Methodology principles.

The index itself is the instrument. On the DEX, a perpetual market settles against the Quanta index on an open central-limit orderbook, and the matching engine keeps the mark price inside a narrow band around the index (see Index price, mark price, last price). Your position is on the category's price, not on a stand-in that wanders away from it.

Three ways to get exposure

Say you believe graded Pokémon is going up. There are three ways to act on it.

	Buy the card	Buy the vaulted card	Trade the index
What you hold	the physical card	a token tied to one vaulted card	a position on the whole category
Exposure	one card	one card	every constituent in the index
Minimum ticket	the card's price	the card's price	your margin
Time to buy or sell	minutes to buy, days to receive, days to weeks to sell	minutes	around the clock, on an orderbook
Go short	no	no	yes
Custody	yours	the vault's	your USDC, under your control
Condition and counterfeit risk	yours	checked at intake	none
Fees	marketplace fees, shipping, grading, insurance	the venue's schedule	taker and maker fees (Fees)
Picking the right card	required	required	not needed

Buying the vaulted card is a real step up: minutes to settle, no shipping, no inspection. It is still one card, and you cannot short it. In the third column, having no card is the whole idea. The position is a contract on a number, with the USDC you deposit as its margin; Perpetuals, explained for collectors explains how that works. The first market is open at /trade/PKMN.

The market, not one card

A collector who knows what a PSA 10 is worth is carrying three risks that have nothing to do with the category. Condition: a regrade or a cracked slab changes the object. Population: one modern Pokémon card was graded 58,000 times in December 2025 alone (Sports Illustrated, Jan 2026). Fashion: a chase card's moment fades. In 2026, single sports cards swung anywhere from -60% to +400% within months (The Hobby Wire, Sep 2026) while the market as a whole climbed, and a modern Pokémon chase card halved, from $1,600 to $832, while vintage cards kept setting records (PokemonPriceTracker, Mar 2026).

An index is not one card, so no single regrade, print run or craze sets its level. It follows the category as a whole. That changes the question you are answering: not which card, but which way. Until now nobody could put money behind that question. How the answer is built, from the card in the vault to your position, is on How Quanta works.

We reviewed every project on this page in September 2026.

Sources for this page are listed in Sources.