The global collectibles market is worth an estimated $400 billion in annual transactions. Trading cards, once bought and sold through binders, forums, and local card shops, are now treated as alternative financial assets — graded, encapsulated, and traded with the same infrastructure as commodities.
At the centre of this shift sits the third-party grading industry. A single grade point difference can change a card’s value by tens of thousands. And as of early 2026, the companies that assign those grades are almost entirely controlled by two corporate entities backed by billions in private equity capital.
This is the story of how that happened, why it matters, and what it means for anyone who collects.
market share
market share
globally in 2025
valuation (2022)
The Collectors Holdings Roll-Up
In early 2021, Collectors Universe — the publicly traded parent company of PSA — was taken private in an $853 million acquisition led by entrepreneur Nat Turner, Cohen Private Ventures, and D1 Capital Partners. The privatisation immediately shielded PSA’s operational data from public scrutiny, while injecting massive institutional capital to scale during the pandemic boom.
By March 2022, after a further $100 million funding round, the newly formed Collectors Holdings was valued at an estimated $4.3 billion.
D1 Capital Partners — founded in 2018 by former Viking Global Investors executive Dan Sundheim — manages approximately $24.5 billion and has increasingly pivoted toward illiquid alternative assets. Their recent initiative to raise a dedicated $1 billion standalone private equity fund highlights a strategic bet on physical alternatives like grading companies.
What followed was a deliberate, systematic roll-up strategy designed to eliminate competition:
Out of 26.8 million cards graded globally by major providers in 2025, PSA alone accounted for 71.8%. Add SGC and Beckett, and Collectors Holdings commands somewhere between 79% and 83% of all graded volume.
Who Owns the Grading Market
Blackstone, CGC, and Sovereign Capital
With PSA, SGC, and Beckett under one roof, the only remaining competitor of any real scale is CGC, owned by the Certified Collectibles Group (CCG). But CCG is hardly an underdog — in July 2021, Blackstone Tactical Opportunities acquired a majority stake in a deal valuing the company at over $500 million.
Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager. Their Tactical Opportunities fund pools capital from global institutional investors, state pension funds, and sovereign wealth entities. The investor syndicate behind CCG also includes Michael Rubin (founder of Fanatics), Roc Nation, and Andre Iguodala.
This matters because the grading industry — once a cottage business of hobbyist authenticators — is now a proxy battleground between two private equity empires. Both are engineered to extract maximum yield from what was traditionally a service-level utility.
Vertical Integration: Grade, Price, Sell
The consolidation isn’t just horizontal. By acquiring CardLadder (a premier pricing analytics platform) and Goldin Auctions (one of the world’s most lucrative collectibles auction houses), Collectors Holdings built a closed loop:
- Grade the card through PSA, SGC, or BGS.
- Set and broadcast its market value through CardLadder.
- Sell it through Goldin Auctions, collecting buyer’s and seller’s premiums.
A single private company now holds proprietary, real-time data on grading submission trends, unreleased population report shifts, and live auction bidding behaviour — all before that information reaches the broader market. The potential for self-preferencing and insider trading is structural.
Collectors Holdings simultaneously controls the authentication of the asset, the proprietary valuation data governing the asset, and the marketplace where it is ultimately liquidated.
The 2025 Grade Swap Scandal
The theoretical risks of this model materialised publicly in the “Grade Swap” scandal of late 2025.
Following the introduction of a PSA slab buyback programme, collectors began documenting severe irregularities. Cards that had been graded as PSA 9s were sold back to PSA via the buyback programme at the lower PSA 9 valuation. Community members subsequently tracked the certification numbers and discovered the same physical cards had been cracked from their encapsulation, regraded internally, and flipped onto the secondary market as PSA 10s under new certification numbers.
The allegation is straightforward: PSA was using its position as both grader and market participant to deliberately undervalue cards at acquisition, then upgrade them for profit. The fiduciary distance between a neutral grading authority and an active dealer had been completely erased.
Viral exposure on Reddit communities like r/PokeGrading and r/baseballcards ignited a trust crisis. The “Score More Points” boycott movement emerged, with local card shops removing PSA branding and shifting submissions to CGC.
GameStop Mystery Slabs
Compounding the scandal was PSA’s retail partnership with GameStop. Whistleblower allegations described PSA using aggressive buyback offers — up to 95–100% of market value on chase cards — to corner the supply on specific assets. Lower-tier slabs valued between $40 and $120 were then bundled into opaque “mystery slab” repacks sold exclusively through GameStop locations.
By controlling population reports, pricing algorithms via CardLadder, and supply distribution, PSA was accused of artificially inflating the perceived value of low-liquidity slabs before offloading them onto uninformed retail consumers through a gamified, randomised channel.
Exploitative Fee Structures
Operating with near-monopoly leverage, Collectors Holdings has systematically restructured its fee schedule. Between late 2025 and early 2026, PSA imposed sweeping price increases that hit entry-level and bulk submission tiers hardest — the exact tiers used by casual collectors and small shops.
PSA justified these 25–32% increases as a mechanism to “tamp down on demand”. The collector community rejected this explanation outright, especially given that the hikes were accompanied by a simultaneous degradation in turnaround times — Value Bulk expanded from 65 to 95 business days.
For the consumer, this is the textbook symptom of a monopoly: paying significantly more for demonstrably slower service, with no viable alternative.
Artificial Scarcity and Population Control
In a purely objective system, the grade of a card should be an absolute reflection of its physical condition, regardless of how many identical cards exist. But glaring statistical anomalies in population reports have led to widespread allegations that grading companies use internal quotas or yield management to suppress the distribution of top grades on high-value or high-print-run cards.
The corporate logic is simple: if PSA awards Gem Mint 10s too freely, the secondary market value of that grade drops. When the market value falls below the cost of grading, the incentive to submit evaporates. By restricting the population of 10s — particularly on modern, mass-produced cards — PSA creates artificial scarcity that sustains the illusion of extreme rarity.
This distortion is visible in one of the market’s strangest phenomena: raw (ungraded) modern cards frequently sell for more than authenticated PSA 8s or 9s. In a rational market, authentication should add baseline value. But in the manipulated market, the raw card retains the theoretical potential of becoming a 10, while the 8 or 9 has been definitively deemed inferior by the algorithm.
The Beckett Black Label
BGS engineered one of the most lucrative implementations of artificial scarcity in the hobby: the Black Label Pristine 10. Awarded only to cards scoring a perfect 10 across all four sub-grades (centering, corners, edges, surface), the Black Label commands exponential premiums over standard Gem Mint 10s. Wealthy collectors and institutional investors relentlessly crack and resubmit cards in pursuit of this grade — each attempt generating fresh submission revenue, regardless of outcome.
Regional Alternatives: ACE and ARS
As the American grading giants raised prices and consolidated power, the logistical realities of cross-border shipping, customs duties, and insurance made submitting to PSA or CGC economically unviable for many international collectors. Regional alternatives emerged to fill the gap.
ACE Grading (UK)
ACE Grading, registered as Graded Holdings Ltd. under British ownership, capitalised on these pain points. Beyond geographic proximity, ACE differentiated through bespoke colour-matched labels and hand-drawn artwork extending the visual theme of each card. UK collectors noted that ACE is frequently harsher on surface and corner grading than PSA, attributed to their use of automated optical equipment and longer assessment times versus the alleged 30-second human inspection at high-volume American firms.
Despite regional popularity and acceptance by UK retailers like CeX, ACE slabs command lower secondary market premiums than PSA on high-end assets. Global liquidity remains structurally tied to the PSA standard.
ARS Grading (Japan)
ARS Grading serves the Japanese TCG market with an ultra-premium, boutique approach: brushed metal labels, frosted edges, thick crystal-clear encapsulation, and the actual grade relegated to the reverse side of the slab. ARS treats the card’s visual appeal as paramount. While these slabs are treated as museum pieces by domestic collectors, their international liquidity is constrained by language barriers and hyper-localised operations.
Both ACE and ARS illustrate a growing split: regional boutiques serve aesthetic appreciation of the collectible, while the commoditised financial liquidity of the asset remains dominated by PSA.
Fractional Ownership and Prediction Markets
As grading fees rose and population reports were manipulated, the industry sought novel avenues for capital extraction. Two speculative derivatives emerged: fractional ownership and prediction markets.
Fractional Ownership: Rise and Fall
Platforms like Rally Rd., Otis, Dibbs, and Collectable securitised high-end graded cards — allowing retail investors to buy fractional “shares” of a PSA 10 Michael Jordan rookie or a LeBron Topps Chrome Refractor. Initially framed as democratisation of wealth, the model collapsed as interest rates rose. Acute liquidity crises left investors unable to offload shares without catastrophic losses. Initial valuations were inflated by platform markups and 2021 peak pricing.
Otis and Dibbs either restructured or faced insolvency. Collectable became embroiled in controversy after a buyout left retail shareholders locked out of their investments entirely. The experiment proved that equity-market mechanics applied to illiquid, subjective physical assets create unsustainable bubbles.
Prediction Markets
Platforms like Kalshi (CFTC-regulated, USD-settled) and Polymarket (crypto-native, USDC-settled on Polygon) have introduced event contracts that allow wagers on collectibles data — final hammer prices at Goldin Auctions, population report thresholds for chase cards, and more.
The systemic risk is glaring: the underlying data resolving these contracts (population reports, auction prices) is unilaterally controlled by the same corporate duopoly that dominates the physical market. An employee with advance access to a CardLadder update or pending population report upload has guaranteed, risk-free arbitrage opportunities.
The Regulatory Reckoning
In December 2025, the announcement that Collectors Holdings intended to acquire Beckett triggered a direct political response. Congressman Pat Ryan (D-NY) issued a formal letter to FTC Chair Andrew N. Ferguson demanding a comprehensive antitrust investigation.
The investigatory demands focus on three core legal tenets:
| Legal Basis | Focus |
|---|---|
| Intentional Monopolisation | Whether the SGC and Beckett acquisitions were executed with documented intent to eliminate competition and corner the market. |
| Serial Acquisition Pattern | Whether the systematic roll-up strategy violates Section 5 of the FTC Act governing cumulative anti-competitive harm. |
| Regulatory Evasion | Whether Collēctīvus Holdings functioned as an illegal pass-through to circumvent pre-merger notification requirements. |
Legal experts note that merely holding a monopoly is not illegal under US law. But using that monopoly to harm consumers, artificially dictate prices, and restrict fair trade is prohibited under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The vertical integration of CardLadder and Goldin, combined with the Grade Swap scandal and arbitrary price hikes, provides a compelling evidentiary basis for forced divestitures.
Box Breaking and the Gambling Question
Parallel to antitrust concerns, the industry faces legal challenges over the mechanics of product distribution. Box breaking — where consumers pay a premium entry fee for a randomised “spot” before sealed product is opened live on streaming platforms — fulfils the legal definition of gambling in most jurisdictions: consideration (payment), an element of chance, and a prize.
The aggressive gamification of breaks — countdown timers, artificial chase card scarcity, parasocial streamer euphoria — constitutes what the FTC defines as “dark patterns” designed to exploit psychology and induce compulsive purchasing.
If the EU classifies box breaking and randomised sealed products as unregulated gambling, the primary revenue engine driving the modern collectibles boom collapses in a major international market.
Where This Goes
The grading industry and the broader financialised collectibles market are at an inflection point. The convergence of exclusionary pricing, shattered consumer trust, and impending federal action suggests the current model is unsustainable.
Several countercurrents are already visible:
- The raw card resurgence. A grassroots consumer rebellion is driving renewed demand for ungraded cards — a rejection of the artificial premium assigned to plastic encapsulation by a distrusted corporate entity.
- CGC as the alternative. Backed by Blackstone’s capital, CGC is aggressively marketing faster turnarounds, clearer slabs, and operational independence from auction houses.
- AI-driven entrants. Firms like TAG (Technical Authentication & Grading) promise entirely objective, algorithm-driven grading that removes human bias and combats population control.
- Federal intervention. If the FTC prosecutes successfully, forced divestitures could reintroduce competition, price stability, and transparency.
If the oligopoly remains legally intact, the hobby risks permanent alienation of its foundational consumer base. Trading cards cease to be a hobbyist pursuit, reduced entirely to speculative financial instruments traded among institutional algorithms and high-net-worth investors.
The outcome will define whether grading remains a service for collectors, or becomes a financial extraction mechanism that merely uses collectors as raw material.