For a while now, I have been thinking about how a blockchain ledger in which your PSA cert number gets tied to a digital token would be a helpful way to determine ownership and provenance of an item.
The way I see this working, would be to have a digital marketplace in which the collectible is tied to a token which is passed along whenever a sale takes place. For example, the seller enters the cert number when listing a card for sale, the platform generates a token for that cert number, and transfers the token to the buyer once he acknowledges receipt of the card.
If someone at a later point tried to list the item with that same cert number in the marketplace they would also be required to provide the corresponding token, so it could be tracked down to all previous owners.
I am not a programming expert, so wouldn’t be able to materialize such an idea, but thought I’d lay it out there for discussion.
Do you think this would benefit the hobby or would it just add an unnecessary layer of complexity for collectors?
There are some key questions which would need answering before anything like this could ever happen:
How do I prove that I own a specific cert in the first place?
What happens if I make a private sale and forget (or I’m unable) to pass my cert on to the next person?
What’s to stop me claiming ownership of someone else’s card?
How do I recover my account if I lose access?
Is such a system actually worth the effort to begin with?
A public ledger would be an interesting idea - it’d back-up or debunk claims about card value based on previous sales, but a lot of people here don’t like the idea of people knowing about how much they paid for a card - which is probably the biggest challenge currently preventing such a thing ever happening.
@gottaketchumall, my post was likely too vague. I didn’t mean it as a way against counterfeits or as a solution, but rather as a feature to keep track of a card’s history of previous owners. With CGC having thrown card pedigree into the mix, I thought it would be interesting to have the ability to track down previous sales and owners.
@pichufan, those are actually great questions and that is exacly what I wasn’t able to come up with a solution for, but @casual, hit an interesting point. In an hermetic market like PWCC’s vault, the token could be issued at the point of entry into the vault, and ownership transferred digitally whenever the card was sold to someone else.
As a collector, I can easily see myself favouring a market with tokenized ownership over ebay or craigslist.
Ah @kaldoverde yeah I took it from a counterfeit prevention side. I wonder what amount of people would be turned off from this wanting to simply anonymously own cards?
Where I see this working for some collectors would be as an easy transfer of ownership, and as a pedigree tracker.
Let’s say a card was owned by GaryVee, who then sold it to Leonhart, who in turn traded it with Smpratte. If there was a ledger in which all of this was tracked, I think it is safe to assume that the popularity of that particular cert number among collectors would be higher than a similar copy of the same card whose previous owner was ‘Anonymous millionaire X’.
Again, the technological aspects are probably so complex that this idea could only be implemented by either the grading companies or a custodial service and not worth the effort, but in the end the token should be something that you as a collector would be proud to have associated with your card.
