Is Borrowing Money Against Trading Card Collections the Next Move For eBay?

This week has seen an interesting development in the trading card space which begs the question, are we going to see eBay follow suit and offer a similar service. As you can tell by the title, the service being talked about is the ability for trading card owners to borrow money against their valuable assets without having to part ways with them.

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This innovative service is being rolled out by Alt, the trading card collectors platform that secured $75 million in funding and poached eBay’s General Manager for Trading and Collectibles Nicole Colombo back in November 2021.

What Alt is now offering is the ability for owners of expensive and valuable card collections to borrow liquid money against their collections without having to sell their assets. One of they key stipulations being that the card(s) must be secured in the Alt Vault…an identical service to the eBay Vault for storing prized collections in safe temperature controlled environments.

“If you have stocks, bonds, real estate, even crypto now, it’s very easy for you to go and take your assets, deposit them somewhere that custodies them, and get a loan against it,”

“We want to do the exact same thing.”

Leore Avidar, Founder, Alt.

eBay Need to Keep Innovating in the Trading Card Space

eBay has made it no secret that they see huge potential in the trading card space and other high ticket items, as earlier this week they announced they had opened up their authenticity guarantee to fine jewelry.

The problem with eBay is that they seem to consistently be the ones trying to catch up in the space by copying others that have come before them. The way that StockX initially authenticated high value sneakers and the way that Alt opened up their vault to keep cards safe has meant eBay have time and again been trying to catch up with innovation.

With this latest announcement from Alt, how long is it before eBay follow suit and start offering a similar borrowing functionality against assets held in the eBay vault.

When it comes to borrowing, it’s not exactly an easy market to just get started with as the Alt Founder discovered when he decided to roll out Alt Advance.

At the time of writing Alt Advance is available in 30 states with the rest hoping to be live by the end of the year, due to different states having different laws and regulations around lending money.

This isn’t the only area that eBay could look to follow suit in. A new player in the space is Liquid Marketplace which is using tokenization so that users can be co-owners of high value trading cards that would otherwise be out of reach.

Whilst eBay certainly has a large audience compared to some of the newer platforms in the trading card space, they are going to need to keep incentives high as to why customers would trust their high value trading cards with them as opposed to their innovative counterparts.