After bursting onto the scene with a Mickey Mantle card that broke open the world of fractional sports memorabilia ownership, Collectable is back with another piece of Yankees goodness that could break some records – and they’re coming with a piece of current technology, too.
First, the old school: on Sunday, April 25 at 6 p.m. ET, Collectable will unveil their latest offering, a 1916 Sporting News Babe Ruth rookie card. The card, which has a PSA grade of 7, is worth $3.69 million, but at just $10 a share, this card marks the largest fractional offering so far.
“High-graded examples of this card are incredibly scarce and rarely surface for ownership; the highest grade ever registered is an 8, and no 9s or 10s exist,” Collectable CEO Ezra Levine told WFAN.com. “This came to us through a prominent collector, and what they loved about it is that it was a historic card and no one had seen it, so he loved the idea of sharing it with people.”
According to PSA’s Card Fasts, this Ruth card is “one of the most difficult cards overall to source and maintain,” and features Ruth in his Red Sox uniform back when he was just a left-handed pitcher, and not quite the “Sultan of Swat” – and the 1916 Sporting News cards in existence are the only known cards with Ruth in a Boston jersey.
“Most of the Ruth cards left have him in a Yankees jersey as a hitter, so this is a true, true rookie card,” Levine said. “It looks and feels historic and predates the more mainstream perception. The prior owner’s belief is that this is one of the most historic collectables ever, a piece of American history, and if it went to auction, it would go to another like them who will just tuck it away, so they wanted it to be shared with the fans instead.”
Collectable’s initial offering, a 1953 Mickey Mantle card valued at $2.5 million, sold out of shares in less than a week, and is now trading on their marketplace for $3.5 million in value.
This Ruth card will be higher right away, but it also comes with a new-school token – for beginning Friday at 3:33 p.m. ET (time chosen for obvious digits), Collectable will also be auctioning off, via eBay, a one-of-a kind Non-Fungible Token designed by DJ Skee showing Ruth in a Yankees uniform.
“We didn’t feel that the actual card celebrated Babe’s Yankees legacy, so we thought coupling the card with an NFT that celebrates the city and the Yankee pinstripes is a good marrying of his origin story and his Yankees legacy,” Levine said.
DJ Skee has already partnered with Topps on some projects, and has partnered with Collectable for a version of his sold-out BR3 card from Topps’ Babe Ruth Project 70 release – an NFT that “mixes inspiration from both Ruth and the city in which he played baseball for 14 seasons” according to Collectable’s official release.
“I’m excited to utilize this moment to help showcase how NFT technology can be used in a different way,” Skee said in that release. “Instead of just creating a digital art piece, this BR3 drop is ushering in a new use case to attribute and verify a physical card and its history using blockchain technology - something I believe will become standardized with many items in the future. There couldn’t be a better way to launch this next-gen project than by partnering with Collectable on the largest fractional offering ever in the industry and pairing the 2021 BR3 card alongside a vintage 1916 Babe Ruth rookie card.”
The NFT auction, which also includes a physical 1 of 1 card of the asset, ends at 3:33 p.m. on April 25 (a couple hours ahead of the Ruth card going live) – and it will start at a penny, Levine said, so “we’ll see what the true demand is.”
“This is a new-age world of NFTs and iconic individual assets, and this is our way of sort of expressing one of the most iconic items in history, the official Babe card, with an exciting, topical thing in our category,” Levine said. “Merging physical and digital is a great path forward, and it’s something we as a company will want to do more of going forward. We think this IPO will break records, and thought it would be an opportune time to celebrate the intersection of modern and legacy content. These are two rare, scarce artifacts being married to celebrate Babe’s legacy.”
You can visit Collectable's website to get more info on Collectable and these events, as well as instructions on how to download the app.
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