Baseball Hall of Famer Derek Jeter this week announced the launch of a new online platform for trading collectible cards amid a sudden spike in the industry.
Arena Club bills itself as a platform for grading, storing, and trading cards. The company has brought in about $9 million in funding with help from investor and entrepreneur Brian Lee's BAM Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, and defy.vc. Members of the company's board include former Topps CEO Ryan O'Hara and former Fox Sports executive David Nathanson.
"I am proud to be part of the team at Arena Club and to work closely with Brian to bring this innovative platform to life," Jeter said in a statement, according to Sportico. "We recognize that there is a real need in the grading industry for clarity, speed and trust, and Brian has put together a team that is committed to providing that to the marketplace."
"It's clarity, it's speed and it's trust," Jeter told Bloomberg. "Building a community, that's our No. 1 goal here."
Arena Club will use the Flow blockchain to track cards and transactions on the platform, according to Lee.
"The idea of vaulting cards, digitizing them, making these transfers and sales instant, all on blockchain, made a lot of sense to me," he told Sportico in an interview.
"As a collector I always wanted more transparency — more reasons as to why my cards scored a certain way, and that was kind of the real genesis of Arena Club, providing computer vision, machine learning, AI-driven grading," Lee continued.
Bloomberg notes that the collectible card industry has surged in recent years, with Fanatics Inc. buying rival trading-card company Topps Co. in January, and EBay Inc. buying the marketplace TCGplayer for almost $300 million in the spring.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.