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There’s another card trading platform in the ring: Enter Drip Shop Live, aka Drip, which has a shopping site, a livestreaming-focused mobile app and plans for more crypto integrations.
Drip has just released Instant Packs, a new feature that gives anyone the ability to “open” physical cards online whenever they want, instead of during limited-time, limited-edition windows to buy from drops or live auctions. Instant Packs are intended to give the feeling of opening a physical card pack, and the physical cards are then shipped to buyers.
Packs can include cards from a range of IPs. You’ll see a lot of Pokémon on their site, but there’s also some Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, and Dragon Ball Z cards. There’s a category for sports cards, though there aren’t actually a lot of that type listed on the site yet.
On Drip, collectors can buy and sell unopened card packs, individual cards, collectors’ boxes, “slabs” or graded encased cards. It’s possible to pay with crypto or fiat currency.
For Instant Packs, the team (for now) is focusing on digitizing slabs, its most popular category.
“We configure the packs using an algorithm that maps probabilities to each reveal. These reveals are 100% random based on the probabilities we map,” Drip CEO and cofounder Javaughn Lawrence told me in an email. “Users can also preview what’s in each pack by 1) looking at the collections in each pack 2) trying in demo mode.”
Drip has a mobile-first feel because their iOS and Android apps offer the livestreaming component. But their website isn’t bad, either.
While the site feels more like eBay, the mobile app is a lot like TikTok Live and TikTok’s shopping features. Both the Drip Android and iOS app versions have positive reviews overall (its Android version has over 100,000 downloads so far). There are about 40 sellers offering collectibles on the platform right now, Lawrence said.
The apps are designed to appeal to live streamers and the entire category of influencers who make videos about card collecting and pack-ripping more broadly, plus the collectors and fans who watch them (think creators like Pokedexter, who I know from my Twitch-streaming and TikTok days).
While the packs and cards on the site aren’t NFTs or onchain right now, Lawrence shared that the Drip team is currently in talks with a few different blockchains, including L1s and L2s, to determine who to work with to explore that possibility. They’re doing a pilot with Ronin in a few weeks.
It’s also possible to open Instant Packs on desktop via a web browser. I did it via Drip’s demo, and they definitely try to give that ASMR card-opening experience with an emphasis on the shiny wrapper and that ripping sound.
Drip also has an in-shop synthetic currency called Driplets, which can be used to get giveaway entries on the app or other rewards. Lawrence said that while the currency isn’t a token right now, “this will be the beginning of our social token when we put that onchain.”
For now, Instant Packs are just for opening cards, but Drip could add a loot box-style opening experience for toys, sneakers, or even jewelry at some point in the future.
The app is a bet on the future importance of livestreaming to shopping and collector culture, for sure. That’s what makes it stand apart from Courtyard, which is mainly a slab-buying platform where buyers can choose whether to “vault” or redeem a card (the physical cards have onchain counterparts).
Courtyard, which uses Polygon, has continued to see substantial sales since a spike back in January. It’s netted over $53.7 million in sales in the past month across over 459,000 transactions and more than 74,600 buyers.
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