“Access to JTCC’s supply, one of the world’s largest liquidity streams in the trading card space, gives Deadstock an unfair advantage most platforms can never reach: deep, continuously replenished real-world inventory at scale,” said Jang.
The eBay question
However, there is an important caveat to this model: liquidity.
eBay remains the industry’s dominant source of price discovery and liquidity in the trading card sector. More than $2.62 billion worth of individual trading cards changed hands on the marketplace in 2025, according to GemRate data, including about $837 million of trading-card-game and non-sports cards. The tally doesn’t include sealed boxes, packs, sets or lots, meaning the broader card business conducted on eBay is even larger.
Liquidity begets liquidity. A seller is naturally drawn to the venue with the largest number of potential buyers, while buyers benefit from a deep history of completed sales that can help establish a particular card’s actual value. That network effect gives eBay an advantage that newer tokenized marketplaces have yet to replicate.
And that creates a chicken-and-egg problem for platforms such as Deadstock.
Transferring ownership on a blockchain may allow a trade to settle almost immediately, but it doesn’t guarantee that someone will be on the other side of the transaction. A tokenized card trading among a small number of users could be less liquid — and harder to price — than the same card listed on an established marketplace.
