ThePokemon Trading Card Gameis in a horrible place for collectors right now. Awful pull rates aside, sealed products are continually impossible to get hold of, withprices reaching extortionate heights on the secondary market, and the same goes for single cards, with the most recent instance seeing random promos from the Sun and Moon eraskyrocketing by up to 880 percent.
There was some indication thatthe bubble might be in the process of burstingback in May, but that turned out to be a false dawn. Now, we could have just gotten our biggest indication of what’s behind the latest surge, and it doesn’t look good, with genuine Pokemon fans, unsurprisingly, not the root of the problem.
Cryptocurrency Is Behind The Massive Surge In Pokemon Trading Card Game Popularity
Back in January, I reported thatthe rise of Pokemon TCG prices directly correlated with the increase in value of many cryptocurrencies. While mostly speculation, collectors told me that “The crypto markets are performing very well for people holding various currencies. These people end up withdrawing their profits and spending them on their hobbies, bringing with it the side who see it as another investment.” This now seems to have been proven true.
Alpha Investments, one of the world’slargest trading card game investors,has confirmedthat “when I’m selling these $25,000 cases, most of the time it’s being paid for through Bitcoin, USD stablecoin, or Ethereum,” suggesting that much of the market is being manipulated by those who have big bucks in crypto.
The YouTuber-cum-investor suggests that the “velocity of change” is way bigger than it should be, meaning prices are jumping at a way faster rate than expected.
He also says that this could be “the biggest bubble of all time” and that prices could potentially drop by 90 percent at any moment. However, he adds that this crash could come at some point far, far in the future. He says that many of the people investing in Pokemon at the moment have been in the hobby “for less than a year”, and don’t know what they’re doing, which is a perfect summary of what is going on at the moment. Scalpers, flippers, and ‘rip-and-shippers’, alongside crypto-enthusiasts, are causing the market to reach untenable prices.
Sadly, I don’t think there’s any solution to this, and with The Pokemon Company continuing to pump out these excellent expansions, and collectors continuing to pay scalper prices, it feels like this is the new norm.
