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Episode 19: Onchain Collecting

34m 56s

Episode 19: Onchain Collecting

In this episode of Exponential, host Dan interviews Joseph, CEO and co-founder of Ketchback, a platform revolutionizing digital collectibles trading. Joseph’s journey began at Nexus, where he worked as a crypto engineer while flipping Pokémon cards as a side hustle. Realizing the inefficiencies in traditional collectibles trading—such as high fees, slow transactions, and lack of transparency—he founded Ketchback to bring crypto tooling to the space. The platform addresses two key problems: liquidity and verifiable randomness. Ketchback offers digital pack openings, where users buy mystery packs containing NFT representations of graded physical cards. They can instantly cash out at 90% market value, ship the physical card, or list it on the marketplace. Users can also create custom mystery packs by selecting specific cards and adjusting odds to match their risk preference, ensuring a tailored experience. The second feature is a low-fee marketplace where NFT-backed cards can be traded for just $1 per transaction, enabling rapid, day-trading-style exchanges without the delays and high fees of platforms like eBay. Joseph emphasizes that this hybrid model—combining on-chain NFTs with physical redemption—provides verifiable randomness through cryptographic hashes, building trust in a space often plagued by scams. The platform aims to empower collectors and side hustlers by making trading fast, transparent, and accessible.

Transcription

6782 Words, 36047 Characters

English
Welcome to Exponential, a Nexus podcast where we talk about people coding capital. I am Dan and Glee. In this episode I talked to Joseph saying, the CEO and co-founder of Ketchback, a new way to interact with digital collectibles. Alright Joseph, welcome to Exponential. Yeah, thanks for having me Dan. Yeah, hey it's great to see you again. Usually I start this show by asking the guests like, you know, how they got to where they are now, but it's really cool and unique because we've worked together in the past. So I feel like I know a little bit about your story, but maybe a good place to start is just talk about, tell us about the founding of Ketchback. Like how did that all kind of come together? Yeah, absolutely. So there's multiple reasons like, or multiple areas that like went into the founding of Ketchback. But when I was at Nexus, like I was a crypto engineer, so learning a lot about like the tooling that was in crypto, basically development software work. And on the side, I was kind of flipping Pokemon cards, right? I'd buy like a hundred dollar card and I'd sell it for like $115. And then buy my girlfriend like Chipotle or something. And I was like, this is a pretty inefficient way to start, like, you know, flipping and making money, right? There's a lot of people I've discovered that are in the collectible space. That local buy collectibles and then try to sell them to make a sort of profit. And people have also like invested a lot of money into these like collectible flipping businesses. It's like they're vendors who are going around, you know, buying 30 to $50,000 of inventory at a time to sell it for like a, you know, plus 10% margin and stuff like that. And so I was like, oh, based on like a lot of my experience of like crypto tooling in Nexus, I think it would be really cool to bring in all of this tooling into like this new space. And so that's kind of how Ketchback was like partially founded. Yeah, and then tell us about, I'm super curious, you know, I think a lot of people would love to, you know, maybe they have a side hustle or something they're interested in or maybe it's just a hobby that makes the money. And there's always this, you know, I'm sure people can relate to this idea in the back of your head where it's like, oh, I should, you know, could I start something, build a company around this idea, something I enjoy doing, something I see the potential in. So walk us through that, how that worked out for you, where you were into this, you were doing Pokemon card trading on the side. And then, you know, that moment where you're like, hey, I could actually build something around this and how, walk us through those steps, how did that all go? Yeah, so I'd gone to Stanford and like Stanford and Silicon Valley is like very, you know, start a focus everywhere there. Everyone there wants to build a startup. And like my path right after graduating was, I kind of took a little bit of like twist and turns. So like right after graduating, I was like working at Amazon and like cloud storage. And then I went to work at McKinsey doing like management consulting. And then I ended up at Nexus just doing like a variety of like different things to figure out like what it is I really wanted. I think kind of like the aha moment of when I was like, oh, I could turn this into a real startup is like when I was like talking with like the people at Nexus and like everyone was saying, oh, this is a pretty cool idea. And I had finally felt that like at this point in my career, like I felt confident enough to like, both manage people as well as as well as to like test myself. I was like, hey, like, you know, building a startup is like a test of like your endurance as well as like your mental stability as well as like how we're going to start. And I also felt like a good enough coder at this point in time where I'm like, OK, like now I can feel more comfortable building out my own product. And then so we applied to why commentator and the why commentator accepted us. There were a couple of like other incubators that we apply to that also accepted us, but like after that, that was like a little bit of a validation of like, hey, like I think our idea is like really solid and like we can really turn this into something big. Very cool. And so when you talk about catch back like and you you're explaining the product or the suite of products that you're building to people, how do you explain the problem you're trying to solve or like how do you, you know, articulate that. Yeah, so we're trying to build like a catch all kind of platform for collectibles trading. And there's a lot of issues in the collectibles trading, you know, kind of ecosystem that we're trying to solve. And so we're trying to solve the same issues of like the ecosystem trading is like liquidity. So this concept of liquidity is something that is very native to crypto, like crypto tooling and platforms are built to be as liquid as possible. And in the collectible space stuff is a lot slower. So you'll buy memorabilia and then like one person might value it somewhat differently than another person. And so that was one of the main problems that we wanted to attack was liquidity. And the second aspect was like verifiable randomness. And in the collectible space, there's a lot of like mystery packs or like blind boxes and like stuff like this, where people are essentially buying these blind boxes, like hoping to, you know, basically open something and be surprised with something of like higher value. But a lot of these blind boxes are basically stuffed with stuff that is like really garbage, like just a trash resellers like on like Instagram and Facebook. And we were like these two ideas of verifiable randomness as well as liquidity are like what we came into attack with building up this cash back platform. Yeah, and I really like, you know, I saw you give a product demo and it was really compelling to see that. And we talked about doing a screen share, but we're actually going to do like a walk through product demo without without visuals so that people listening to the audio of this podcast won't feel left out. But I think one thing just that struck me while you were doing that demo is how it's it's really intriguing to combine this psychology and sort of the, I don't know the habits maybe or the things that are accepted in the world of collectibles of like, hey, this is how it works, the buying and trading, buying selling trading with like more unchained features, things like NFTs and the ability to trade a card multiple times without necessarily needing to worry about the sort of physical trading of the card, you can trade the NFT of the digital version and then at a certain time, you can worry about the physical component. So that was really striking to me and kind of super interesting, especially in the context of how digital trading has happened so far or some of the peaks and valleys we've seen with with digital assets specifically like NFTs and how they worked out so far. And I really think that to me that that was like something that was really cool to see and have you explain with catch back so maybe we could do let's try to do an audio only product demos like how would that work? Let's walk through from the top like somebody lands on catch back and what happens. Yeah, sure, so I'll try to explain super clearly in structure because I know like doing an audio walk through is really difficult. We have two main features. So our first feature is digital pack openings and our second feature is a marketplace trading platform. And there are multiple subsections of each platform, but I'll dive into like these two main product offerings one by one. So our first product is the digital pack openings. So what we do Daniel is that we package all of our essentially real life trading cards that are plastic in case slabs and we turn these into a digitized NFT. And we turn these NFTs into a digital mystery pack that people can open and then they can receive one graded card as a basically a hit for opening a pack. So for example, you pay $100, you'd spin through a pack of like 20 30 cards and then you'd be able to receive a card at the very end. And when you receive this card, there's multiple things that you can do. So this card is a NFT and the NFT maps one to one with a real world card. So what you can do here at this moment that you hope that you buy the mystery pack and then you receive a card as you can either ship the card to yourself or you can sell the card back to us or you can like list the card in our marketplace. And then you can get one of those three things currently. And when you ship the card to yourself, like that's a very very straightforward, like you just choose the shipping option and we ship the card to you. The second option of where you'd be able to get a liquidity option is like you'd open up the card and you'd instantly be able to sell it back to us for whatever 90% of the market value is. So let's say you have a hundred dollar pack and you hit a $50 card, then you're paid out and $45 and either stable coin or PayPal credit to your bank account and you get an instant liquidity or you can open up this hundred dollar pack. And then you get a $200 card, then you're paid out at $180 to either your bank account or stable coin or you could choose to get the card shipped to yourself and you could try to sell that on like you know Facebook marketplace or Instagram or whatever, whatever have you. So that is like kind of the first part of our digital blind box opening so to speak if you're if you're familiar with like LeBubu's or like this type of trend that's been my going around, you know, imagine you can open a LeBubu blind box and whatever it is that you hit, you can instantly turn that into money by selling it back to the LeBubu company and that's kind of what we build out. Yeah, so a second aspect of a second aspect of our digital pack opening is that we a lot we create a custom mystery pack so this is where users can pick exactly what goes into their mystery pack. So let's say you are a collector who only likes collecting charzards right you can pick five charzards that go into your mystery pack and you're guaranteed to hit a charge hard. So instead of like these other mystery back companies where you can hit you know whatever random hollow energies or stuff that like nobody wants in our customer's repack you can pick exactly what you have. Now the great thing about our customer's repack is that it's fully customizable so what this means is that you can choose essentially what price you pay for the pack by playing up and down with the odds. So let's say you're someone who's a very gambling collector, so to speak, right? What you're going to do is you're going to put a $10 card. You're going to put $1,000 card and we're going to charge you $500. Right? So, and then you have a 50/50 chance of getting that $1,000 card or a $10 card. And then whatever you hit, you can instantly cash out to us at a 90% fair market value. If you're someone who's super risk-averse, what you can do is you can put five cards that are all worth $50 into your pack. You'll charge you $50 and then you're guaranteed a $50 hit. So in this aspect, there's no, like the risk factors, like whatever collectors want to have. Right? There's people who are very like, "Hey, I want a double or nothing on my money." And there's people who are like, "Hey, I want a guaranteed, you know, if I put $50 in the pack, I want a $50 card." And that's what we're trying to solve. And you can also fully customize it, whatever you put, right? So for example, my girlfriend really likes collecting like EVs and like Silvea and so like these like cute cards. You can create a cute custom mystery pack for someone and then they're guaranteed like one of the cards that you put in that are like very cute. Yeah, and I like that concept too because, you know, people come to collectibles for different reasons, right? Maybe they're interested in the speculation or the idea of, you know, getting this buying into a mystery pack and then getting a card of high value. And then there's other people that come to collectibles because they are just interested in the collectible itself and not so much in the speculative aspects. And so it seems like with that product, you're able to kind of depending on what your interest is, you can kind of still play the mystery pack game, but come at it from your, you know, your view on on why it is you're into collectibles. And I should say to you, I know we're doing this audio version of the product walkthrough, but this is a really cool feature. Hopefully people can go to catch back and check it out where you can you can kind of play with those probabilities and use a tool to kind of like exactly customize that that pack how you want to try out the product. Like to actually open the pack like obviously you have to pay for the pack opening. But to just like create the pack and play around with it, there's no cost so people can just like play around. So one other thing Daniels for that first product with the mystery back opening that we really want to emphasize is verifiable randomness. So there's this like marketplace or like kind of like the kind of the layout of the land, so to speak of like pack openings is that there's a lot of people like repacking on like Instagram and whatnot. You know all these streamers who basically advertise their mystery bags and behind the scenes it's really hard to know what exactly they put into their mystery bags right like they'll advertise like oh this one chase card worth a thousand dollars. This is something that you can hit. But the odds and the transparency around these odds is really really hidden right they'll say like one in 50 will hit a thousand dollar card. But then the rest of the 49 packs are going to put like a 10 dollar card or something that's like no like something that you wouldn't be happy with. Now what we do is like we bring in this like crypto aspect of like provable randomness where like based on the price value of the cards. You you get to see exactly what it is that you could potentially hit and then we give you a cryptographic hash that essentially shows you like hey like we didn't tamper with you know the randomness of this at all and that you're you have a guaranteed. Ones based on like what it is that you're putting in so when you open up these like other mystery bags what's going to happen because like these people are stuffing these bags with like physical stuff right it's like none of this is like tech or like none of this is very digital. It's like very scammy people will put in whatever it is that they want. Because we have this verifiable eventually we're going to be moving this light on chain like type of like code you can see exactly like hey like for what it is you opened here's your seed here's your hash and this shows you that this is verifiable that we didn't manipulate the odds or anything like that and it's truly random. Yeah that's really cool and I like that that that idea of what we're discussing is like bringing how to bring collectibles on chain and do it in a way where only part of the experience maybe is on chain and part of it still sort of like you know the physical format or some more of that trading that doesn't happen on chain. And I think that that isn't also an interesting kind of combination where in the past what we've seen is like the maybe the whole experience has been on chain or the whole experience has been off chain but that's like kind of hybrid where there'll be certain touch points on chain that you can use things like verifiability and just. You know kind of vetting and NFT if you will and then and then there'll still be that that kind of physical component where if you really want your hands on that card you can get it exactly exactly. And another thing just that you were explaining and I thought was really cool and we'd probably be intriguing for for our audiences just this idea of building towards the ability to sort of day trade cards right or or do more real time trading maybe you can kind of walk us through how that would work or what your vision for for that product is. So the second that that's a good segue into our second product offering which is the $1 marketplace or $1 marketplace has two two parts number one is the options and number two is the straightforward listings so for the straightforward listings we're building a Robin Hood type day trading market where to give you basically context as to what the existing kind of ecosystem look like is collectors when they want to acquire cards they have to buy them off of eBay or off of Facebook marketplace. And eBay takes about a 15% chunk like they take a 15% fee so if you wanted to sell a thousand dollar card then you would take 150 dollars in fees you'd ship the card to someone who's the buyer and that that process would take like a week right like you have to ship the card you have to go to a store and drop it off. Now what we kind of thought is that people want to make money like on these sites are people want to have like a side hustle that's a lot of what you know crypto people are like to people want to like figure out how they can earn money and one aspect that we realize is like we can accelerate this by trading digital representations of the cards which is like an NFT. So we take the physical card we represent it as an NFT and then people can trade the NFT in our marketplace and we charge just a $1 sale on the completed transaction so this this makes it so that like for the same card this card could theoretically exchange hands like you know 50 or 100 times a day and for like let's say there's a thousand dollar card. This thousand dollar card is going to cost you just a thousand and one dollars to buy and then you can list it in our marketplace and try to sell it for a thousand 50 dollars right and then you'd list it and sell it for a thousand 50 someone will buy that for a thousand 50 and then you receive a thousand 49 so you just take a one dollar fee each time like you're buying it selling and this makes it so that you can take the remaining 48 dollars and like you keep that you profit that. And this is really cool because the old eBay model like there's a lot of authenticity issues where like people are scamming there's a lot of issues with regards to like shipping and like things not arriving on time and stuff like that and there's like a delay in terms of how long the purchases will take and there's also the fact that eBay has to take a pretty large fee right they have to pay their workers pay for like costs of like technology and stuff. But for us because like we're going to be moving things like an on chain system we make trading a lot faster and we can pass those wins off to our consumers and so this product is really designed for people who like you know want to have like a day job like you know like maybe maybe eventually like it's become someone's full time job where they're just like spotting arbitrage opportunities. But this is also for people who want like a low you know basically like a low friction way to like trade so you can you know buy a card like $50 sell it for $60 and then you make $8 which is unprecedented because otherwise like what you have to do is you buy a card for $50 you meet up with someone from like Facebook marketplace like someone local or you'd have to like ship across country and then that takes like you know $15 like from your from your margins and that just makes like trading really good. And so we really saw like this aspect of like crypto that like real like hey like we really liked how fast ownership of assets could essentially change and like the verifiableness of that in our second product outside of that marketplace is going to be the auctions and so one of the things that we found with eBay is like eBay goes from the bottom up so at eBay sale you know you start with $0 $5 $10 all the way like let's say a card is valued at 100 right. So you'd have to bid up to like 100 105 to get that card sold now what we wanted to do is like we want to incentivize liquidity and incentivize speed. And so what we do is we do a backward style auction. So someone will take their card like let's say the card is worth $100 they're going to start the listing from like $110 and they'll set a floor price of like let's say like 95 or $90 and they can set the time at which the price of the car drops every few seconds or every like 30 seconds. And so the concept here is like eBay sales like a eBay auction will take like three days seven days right to be able to bid up and up a cashback auction is going to go top on them. The idea here is that like we're going to have a bunch of people like looking at the website and if you were a buyer and you're not able to you know you're like saying like oh should I pass on this deal or not. If you don't get it then someone else right behind you is going to snap it up for a slightly better deal or something like that. Right. You know just if when you're explaining all this it it makes me. think about the larger narrative that's happening right now in crypto of real world assets coming on chain. And essentially that's what you're doing here with collectibles and Pokemon cards specifically right now. But with other collectibles, other kinds of card trading, sports cards or other things related to that. And kind of the way you're explaining it fits perfectly with the reasoning or the logic for bringing other real world assets on chain is just this efficiency of a marketplace. And the idea that you can have both a physical representation of something and a digital representation. The digital representation can trade at a greater velocity or frequency than the physical representation. But at the end, it kind of all settles back to, in this case, you have a one to one NFT to physical card. And tokenizing other kinds of assets, whether it's a barrel of oil or a bar of gold or whatever, the concept is kind of similar and the need or the logic behind bringing those assets on chain is just the same thing like that that efficiency. So it's kind of cool. I didn't put that together before when we were talking about it. I was kind of really focused on the sort of collectible aspect. But as I heard you explain it just now, that kind of popped in my head. So let's talk about how you plan on one of the reasons I wanted to have you on exponential and catch up is you have some plans to use catchback or use nexus, I should say, in the catchback stack. And so maybe you could just kind of walk us through what your vision is there and how you see that all unfolded. Yeah, absolutely. So my vision is like in the in 2020, 2021, we kind of had this NFT craze where people are really guiding in and looking at NFTs for the first time. And honestly speaking, the market crashed, there was so much money being pumped into NFTs, the crazy apes, all of that. After a while, people realized that like, hey, these NFTs don't really hold, like some people might think that they held value, but like the amount of trust or backing in an NFT, like people didn't really get it. So that's why we were thinking about collectibles and like bringing stuff onto nexus. Right? Like for example, like a Pokemon card, like there's a market for that. Like people want to collect cards. And like that's as the rarity goes up, like there is backing from like the Pokemon company as well as like grading card companies like GameStop and PSA that will give you money for like these collectibles, which is why there's like a liquidity aspect there. So my plans for like building onto nexus are multi-fold. So as someone who previously worked at nexus, I was really impressed by like this concept of verifiability, right? And the number one thing that we want to build is like two things, verifiability and speed. So with regards to like verifiability, like we want to use potentially like the ZGVM to also add on top of our existing cryptographic functions that show verifiability. So that consumers can see that this is completely bulletproof. And it's also just very fast to be able to have this like verifiable algorithm. What you also want to do with regards to like speed is like being able to deploy on chain. So people can see like hey, like these are our transactions being like moved back and forth. And that builds a sort of trust and a sort of understanding of like everything coming smoothly. Yeah, it's really cool. And I think we touched on this, but just I think it's an important point for what you're building and also kind of that larger narrative we're talking about with tokenizing real world assets is that not every step of the process of for catchback for your company to work needs to be on chain, right? It's just that that point of having sort of like a backup or that ability to verify key parts of a trade or in this part key key parts of of an exchange of a card. Exactly. And so yeah, that's kind of an interesting thing. And I think just just bringing that up again is kind of I think we're seeing more and more of that where when people are building on chain, it's not so much like the whole entire company or the whole entire flow, transactional flow from like the beginning to the end. It needs to be on chain. It's just like, okay, we can verify these certain components. Exactly. Cool. So where are you right now in the trajectory of catchback? Like what you launched the company only recently and tell us about, you know, sort of your trajectory so far and you know, what were you headed in 2026? Absolutely. So we launched like we formally kind of launched everything. We were in beta testing for whilst now we're in open beta where users can like try out the different products. We literally launched like last Monday. And you know, now we feel like it's a pretty stable site. And then our current plan is like we want to get all of our first like test users and be able to reward them with like drops and stuff. We have like a discord channel where we'll be doing like giveaways and like community events and like stuff like that. And we really want a hyper scale within like the next three to six months, right? When I get our early power users, people who are really passionate in this idea of like technological like collectibles trading where people can make like side hustles and like earn money off of that. And that's like what we're coming to like with like, you know, different users like advertising on like Reddit talking with like Nexus, like going to like YouTube vendors and like people who are streamers. Our next three to six months are going to be focused on like hyper skill and growth as well as like giving a really white love service to our early users. So what we've been doing so far is doing like some sort of a deposit match. So you deposit $50. We'll give you $50 to spend. And we're able to do this because this is our early power users that we really appreciate. But we're also offering like free shipping for now. We're like eating the cost of shipping. We're saying like, Hey, you want a card? Like here, here's the way that you get the card. Usually people would have to pay on that. What we are also planning to do is my high level vision for this company is in the same way, like you've seen like polymarket and like call sheet and like people like basically trading on prediction events, right? And in the past, people have have traded on stocks, right? People have traded on Coca-Cola or like bars of gold and like, you know, ETFs and stuff like this. I want to build a company where people can essentially day trade or speculate on real world collectibles that they really like. So for example, imagine like a a Louis Vuitton handbag type of stock or NFT where your wife tells you like, Hey, honey, can you like get me this like handbag? I promise it's an investment. And you're like, like what the hell? Like is this really an investment? Like, you know, I don't really know. But with catchback collectibles, like we're going to turn this into an actual investment where if you want the handbag, you can choose to get the handbag shipped to you. The handbag is going to appreciate and value. You can like observe the value of these cards or collectibles over time. And instead of trading in something like, I don't know, like Nvidia, like why don't you day trade in like Cologne or like a Rolex watch. And that's what we really want to start with with like Pokemon cards and then we're going to expand this. So in Colchie, you know, you're in the polymarket, you guys are predicting off of like real world events, right? In this way, we want to build a platform where people predict off collectibles. And so the idea here is like, eventually we're going to have a blind box for watches, a blind box for cologne, a blind box for handbags or like jewelry and like stuff like that. And these are these are all things that people really describe real world resellable value to as well right? Like, you know, you could go to any jewel jewel or get like some sort of a, you know, cashout for gold or whatever it is. Like my girlfriend is really into like the van cleaf necklaces. So I was like, okay, in the future, like we'll build, we'll build something for that. And due to all of the technological tooling, like that we have available in the crypto space, we're going to kind of bring that over to like Web 2 world. And really just like have this integration web 2.5, we call it, like this integration between a lot of the things that we're taking all the lessons that we saw in the NFT type of like, you know, 2021 market. And we're going to apply those to a better service than eBay, a better service than whatever is existing for like the collectibles market. And really just like hone in on like optimizing the experience for everyone. So that's what we're planning to do within the next three to six months. And then in the future, like within like five to 10 years. In the same way that like stock X kind of boomed like crazy for people, you know, buying and selling sneakers, we're going to try to take that and we're going to prove it. We're going to have all of this technological tooling that and sort of like buying and selling like a sneaker, you're going to buy and sell a digital representation of a sneaker. Like in the same way, like when, you know, basically like gold bonds first came out, people are like, oh, why would I want to buy a gold bond, right? Like I could just buy a bar of gold. Now what we're going to do is I we're going to create this like same system, but make it even better, give people other tools for, you know, essentially like collectibles. And I think that's a really interesting market. And it's like where I think the internet is going to converge to, right? Like you already see within like the last year or two, like all these like, you know, sports betting sites are turning into like the call sheet and like, you know, people, you know, betting on like the election and stuff. But what happens like if like outside of the election, you have a very strong attachment to like, I think, you know, these like sneaker drops by like these celebrities are really going to go up and value it for time. How do I invest in that? We're going to build an avenue in a place where people can start up from that. That's really cool. Yeah, I appreciate that. I like that answer. Often, the last question I leave people with is looking ahead. I think you answered the looking ahead piece and your vision for the future. One thing I'd like to end this conversation today is in your opinion, why do you think right now is the right time to do this? It does feel like you're tapping into this, the energy and the momentum you're mentioning or drawing a comparison to prediction markets, which we've seen in 2025 was absolutely the year that the prediction markets arrived. We're seeing other things, if you've been paying attention maybe since around COVID time, this idea of collectibles, especially in other venues you're talking about watches or clones or whatever it might be, seems like it has become a thing. I'm curious from your perspective, why is right now the right time to build something like this? This is just my hunch, Daniel, and maybe I'm wrong here. The my hunch with why this is the best time to be building is that people want to have side hustles. People are realizing nowadays in 2025, 100,000 dollars doesn't stretch as far as it used to be. People are looking for ways that they make money or have side hustles. My peers are tutoring or dog walking or something, and people also want ways to make money quickly. People don't necessarily want to work at a fast food restaurant and stuff like that to earn money. A lot of people are turning to, honestly, a lot of these gambling websites to see if they can make money. But people also understand here that obviously the house always wins. What we're trying to do and why we think this is a perfect time to be building into the collectible space is that we're building a system where people will be able to work for themselves. We're building a system where if you think that you can make money off of this collectibles, we're making money off of the platform fee. We're building a system that works for you, a building that works for the community and the ecosystem as a whole. People right now are all honestly also not wanting to be consumers forever. For example, like Pokemon cards. Nobody wants to spend 10K, 20K forever without adding value. And what we're trying to do is we're building a system for people where they buy cards. They have a certain value or they have a way to liquidate the cards. We're also working with a couple of other features that we can talk about in future podcasts with a load protocol or a yield farm generation for Pokemon cards and collectibles. But we're really aiming, and the reason why we think this is the prime time to build is that people are waking up and they're also understanding that, in order to compete with today's global market, you really have to be a global value provider. Right? If you're working for a company, you might have your value just locally, or you're working for that company. But people are really trying to figure out how they can build competitive skills at a competitive bench. And we're really building out this marketplace feature for people who want to put in the efforts to research, this is where a collectible will go up in value over time. Or for example, for sports collectors, if you think a rookie is going to perform really well again, they're next few years, this is the time that you would invest in. Right? People are like, there's no, if you're really into sports and you're saying, hey, I watch football all the time, I think this guy is going to be a star in the next five years. But how do you monetize that? Like, how do you implement your edge such that you have a side hustle? And that is essentially what we're trying to tap into. Very cool. Yeah, that's awesome. I can't wait to hear about the future products that you develop using this collectible model. It sounds like it could be really fascinating. And we'll definitely have to catch up again in the future and see how things are going with catch back. But thank you so much today for taking the time and kind of walking us through what you're building. And it's always very catching up with you. Absolutely. All right, thank you so much for your time Daniel. All right, talk to you soon. Bye. Cool. Thank you for listening to this episode of I'm Spongebob. We'll be back next week with another show featuring people coded capital. Please like, review and share I'm Sponential wherever you listen to your podcast and be sure to visit app.nexus.xyz to see what we are building.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Ketchback is a platform that combines physical collectibles with digital NFTs to improve liquidity and verifiable randomness in trading.
  2. The platform offers two main features
  3. Digital pack openings allow users to customize mystery packs with specific cards and odds, offering choices for risk-tolerant or risk-averse collectors.
  4. The platform uses cryptographic hashes to ensure verifiable randomness, addressing trust issues common in traditional mystery pack sales.
  5. The marketplace charges a flat $1 fee per transaction, enabling fast, low-cost trading of NFT-backed cards, similar to day trading, with the option to ship physical cards on demand.

Summary:

In this episode of Exponential, host Dan interviews Joseph, CEO and co-founder of Ketchback, a platform revolutionizing digital collectibles trading. Joseph’s journey began at Nexus, where he worked as a crypto engineer while flipping Pokémon cards as a side hustle. Realizing the inefficiencies in traditional collectibles trading—such as high fees, slow transactions, and lack of transparency—he founded Ketchback to bring crypto tooling to the space.

The platform addresses two key problems: liquidity and verifiable randomness. Ketchback offers digital pack openings, where users buy mystery packs containing NFT representations of graded physical cards. They can instantly cash out at 90% market value, ship the physical card, or list it on the marketplace.

Users can also create custom mystery packs by selecting specific cards and adjusting odds to match their risk preference, ensuring a tailored experience. The second feature is a low-fee marketplace where NFT-backed cards can be traded for just $1 per transaction, enabling rapid, day-trading-style exchanges without the delays and high fees of platforms like eBay. Joseph emphasizes that this hybrid model—combining on-chain NFTs with physical redemption—provides verifiable randomness through cryptographic hashes, building trust in a space often plagued by scams.

The platform aims to empower collectors and side hustlers by making trading fast, transparent, and accessible.

FAQs

Ketchback is a platform for trading digital collectibles, combining physical trading cards with NFTs to solve issues like liquidity and verifiable randomness.

The founder, while working as a crypto engineer and flipping Pokémon cards on the side, saw inefficiencies in collectible trading and wanted to apply crypto tooling to improve liquidity and transparency.

Ketchback has two main features: digital pack openings, where users open mystery packs to get NFTs of graded cards, and a marketplace for trading these NFTs with low fees.

Users pay for a mystery pack containing digital NFTs of real cards. After opening, they can ship the physical card, sell it back to Ketchback for 90% of market value, or list it on the marketplace.

Users can select specific cards for their pack, adjusting the price based on odds. For example, a pack with a $10 and $1,000 card costs $500, giving a 50/50 chance at either.

Ketchback uses verifiable randomness from crypto technology, providing a cryptographic hash to prove that pack odds were not tampered with.

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