From on-chain grading to 10,000 units. At the last Colosseum hackathon, I pitched GAS, an on-chain grading company, to 300 people. One of the judges, Braden Handley (co-founder of Inkbox, acquired by BIC for $65M USD), joined as my co-founder right after. Talking to collectors, we learned that most real trades happen with raw cards in toploaders, not graded slabs. So we pivoted to Capsule: an NFC toploader that gives every card a verifiable history on Solana, without waiting months for a grade.
Since then:
- Raised $125K from angels including Top 900 global youtuber
- a16z became our first customer
- Locked manufacturing partners for molds, NFC chips and assembly
- Our first 10,000-unit run is nearly done, with the first 500 already in Canada
- iOS and Android apps are live, and the Solana layer is live on devnet using compressed NFT card passports
- Showed at a Toronto card show, and we're now speaking with top Pokémon creators
Next up: finalizing premium packaging, launching on Amazon, and turning every real-life tap into a safer peer-to-peer marketplace. Catch it. Tap it. Track it.
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