BAXUS is a New York-based peer-to-peer marketplace for fine and rare wines and spirits, built on the Solana blockchain. It authenticates physical bottles, stores them in climate-controlled vaults, and issues digital tokens representing direct ownership - giving collectors and institutions real-time pricing, instant trade settlement, and the ability to use bottles as loan collateral. The platform has facilitated over $20 million in whiskey trades and raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital in 2024.
Rare Candy is a New York- and Dallas-based online marketplace built for trading card game collectors. It brings the social energy of the neighborhood hobby shop online, letting people buy, sell, auction, and track sealed booster boxes, vintage packs, and graded cards across Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, Gundam, and Lorcana. Co-founded by product veteran Chris Knape and YouTuber Lee Steinfeld (Leonhart), the platform pairs verified inventory and Thursday live auctions with an AI-powered card scanner that identifies cards in English and Japanese and surfaces real-time pricing.
TRLab is an art-and-technology company that fuses Web3 tools with fine-art expertise to reinvent how people learn about, experience, and collect art. Co-founded in 2021 by Christie's non-executive Deputy Chairman Xin Li-Cohen and CEO Audrey Ou, the platform builds education-driven, interactive collecting journeys with major artists, estates and institutions - including the Calder Foundation, the Chris Burden Estate, Cai Guo-Qiang, Vogue and digital-art organization Rhizome. It has raised roughly $9.2M total, and more recently has begun extending its creative IP into lifestyle goods and immersive experiences.
CollX is a Philadelphia-area startup whose mobile app lets collectors snap a photo of a sports or trading card and instantly identify it and see its current market value. Built around AI visual search trained on a database of more than 17 million cards, CollX has grown from a quick valuation tool into a full collection-management platform and peer-to-peer marketplace where over 3 million users scan, organize, price, buy, sell, and trade cards. The company monetizes through Pro and Gold subscriptions, marketplace commissions, and referral revenue from hobby partners like PSA, Whatnot, and Fanatics.
eBay is one of the original internet marketplaces, a global platform where roughly 136 million buyers shop across hundreds of millions of listings in about 190 markets. Born in 1995 as a hobby site called AuctionWeb, it pioneered the idea that strangers could trust strangers enough to trade online. Three decades later it has reinvented itself around enthusiast categories, certified collectibles, and recommerce - selling the new, the rare, and the gloriously second-hand.