Alt

Alt is a platform for buying, selling, valuing, storing and authenticating collectible trading cards, built around the broader goal of making alternative assets more liquid and transparent. Users can exchange and invest in cards, look up valuations derived from recent transactions and aggregated market data, store holdings in the company's custody service (the Alt Vault), and borrow against their collections. The company describes its mission as unlocking the value of alternative assets, with a vision that "anything is an investable asset."

Product components reported by sources include real-time pricing data and transaction histories covering more than ten million cards, analytics on players and market trends, cross-marketplace search that compares active listings, and a marketplace supporting both 24/7 auctions and fixed-price listings. Alt Lending extends loans collateralized by card holdings. Founder and CEO Leore Avidar, who also co-founded and led the direct-mail and address-verification API company Lob, has said he began investing in sports cards in 2016 and in crypto in 2014, and that the difficulty of using alternative assets as loan collateral motivated building financial infrastructure for the category.

Avidar has framed the trading-card business, which he sized at roughly $15 billion, as a "proof of concept" for extending the model to other physical and digital alternative asset classes, with a longer-term aspiration of creating an exchange for private stock; he stated the company would remain focused on trading cards until it was number one in that market.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Leore Avidar, who previously co-founded and led Lob, says he has long invested in alternative assets, buying crypto since 2014 and sports cards since 2016 after his father sent him a box of cards. He concluded that financial institutions did not treat such assets as secure loan collateral, which led him to build financial infrastructure intended to make alternative assets more liquid, transparent and marketable.

Business model

Alt operates as a transaction platform: it provides a marketplace where users buy and sell trading cards, free custody/vaulting, fraud protection for buyers and sellers, valuation data, and loans secured by users' collections.

Alt charges a 5% fee on transactions, according to Forbes. It also originates loans against customer card holdings through Alt Lending.

Traction

As of November 2021, users had stored $70 million worth of cards in the Alt Vault. As of September 2022, the platform's largest card sale was a 2003/2004 LeBron James Bowman Chrome Gold Refractor at $189,506. As of May 2023, its valuation tool covered more than ten million cards and Alt Lending had originated over $21 million in loans.

Latest developments

In July 2022 Alt introduced lending that allows customers to borrow against trading card collections, and in August 2022 it announced $200 million in funding. Reported metrics extend to May 2023, when its valuation tool covered ten million-plus cards and Alt Lending had surpassed $21 million in loan originations.