How Collectibles.com Is Building Infrastructure for Collectors

Dietrich von Behren held up a 1977 Star Wars lunchbox on camera, one of roughly 300 he has accumulated over the years. "For me, it's a matter of nostalgia," he said. "It's not always about value, it's about significance, it's about meaning." Von Behren is a co-founder of Collectibles.com, and the lunchbox sits behind him in every video call, part of a wall of vintage metal tins that doubles as an accidental demonstration of the product he is building. The point he was making is that the reasons people collect things are as varied as the things themselves, and that variety is central to what his company is trying to address.

From Cardbase to Collectibles.com

Collectibles.com did not start under that name. The company launched as Cardbase, a collection management app focused on trading cards, specifically sports cards and Pokemon. Von Behren joined the founding team later in the process, alongside Alex Ivanov and Anas Salem, his two co-founders who are based in Germany.

The company is now in its fourth year. It counts Peter Thiel among its investors, along with Solana as a strategic backer from early on. The platform has grown to nearly 2 million users, with over 30 million items under management representing more than $10 billion in aggregate value. Those numbers reflect a deliberate choice to build the utility layer first, before attempting anything more structurally complex like a marketplace.

The Core Four

Von Behren describes what Collectibles.com offers as an integrated destination for people who collect things. The "core four," as he calls them based on user data, are cards (both sports and Pokemon TCG), comics, coins, and stamps. Those four categories represent a large share of what collectors hold globally, but the platform is designed to handle far more. Sneakers, sports memorabilia, vintage lunchboxes, historical items all fall within scope.

The practical entry point for a new user is the scan feature on the iOS or Android app. A photo of any object gets matched against the card catalog or passed through an AI image recognition layer that attempts to identify it and surface relevant history. Von Behren says the app "almost turns users into treasure hunters," the kind of thing someone might take to an antique shop, a garage sale, or a relative's attic. The AI is not authentication-grade and cannot verify signatures or confirm provenance through a photo alone, but it does deliver what the team calls a "magic moment" when it correctly identifies something unexpected.

One category of user Collectibles.com has found it did not fully anticipate is what von Behren calls the passive collector: someone who owns items of potential value but has not actively thought of themselves as a collector. The scanning function has surfaced items for people who simply did not know what they had.

Blockchain Is Behind the Interface

Von Behren is deliberate about how he frames the role of blockchain in the platform. Collectibles.com started as Web2 and has been moving toward integrating blockchain functionality in ways designed to be invisible to most users. His analogy is plumbing.

"I think we can all agree that blockchain is infrastructure. And just like plumbing in a house where you know makes things work, it gets covered up. It's behind the wall. So in many ways, blockchain is behind the interface. It's going to be the rails, the operational rails."

The practical demonstration of that approach came when Collectibles.com brought its Repackz product on chain at Solana Breakpoint in Abu Dhabi. Repackz is a mystery-pack gaming product where users open packs without knowing the contents in advance. Pokemon cards are the most popular category within it. When the team put Repackz on Solana, each pack and each card within it received a twin NFT. That on-chain record is an early version of the provenance tracking von Behren sees as the more significant long-term application.

Trust in collectibles commerce is a genuine problem. Counterfeit items, questions about prior ownership, and uncertainty about authentication all create friction for buyers and sellers. Blockchain-based provenance records could address those concerns without requiring collectors to understand or care about the underlying technology, which is exactly the kind of friction-free integration von Behren says the platform is aiming for.

Off-Market Items and the Coming Marketplace

One of the more telling figures von Behren shares is that the majority of items currently tracked on Collectibles.com are what the team calls off-market: not listed for sale anywhere. Users are uploading their collections for management and valuation, not because they intend to sell. That creates an unusual situation where a platform with 30 million catalogued items has very little of that inventory actively in commerce.

That observation shapes the marketplace Collectibles.com plans to launch this year. Users are already using the platform's community features and direct messaging to arrange trades informally. Von Behren acknowledged this is happening and said it is one of the signals that convinced the team the time was right to build formal commerce infrastructure. The decision to wait was deliberate. "It would be foolhardy if we would have done it three years ago because we didn't have the scale," he said. Building the collection management utility first generated the user base and the data needed to make a two-sided marketplace viable. NFT collections are also on the roadmap as a supported category, which would let users track digital collectibles alongside physical ones in a single portfolio view.