That industrywide surge came as a surprise even to Evan Vandenberg, Dibbs’ CEO and cofounder, who began formulating the idea for the startup well before the pandemic, when he was working in business development at the blockchain company Worldwide Asset eXchange and brought in Topps as a partner for a digital set of Garbage Pail Kids cards.
Dibbs creates NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, corresponding to individual cards and fractionalizes them, allowing users to buy or sell small stakes in cards that might otherwise be prohibitively expensive. The cards are kept in a third-party vault until a user accumulates enough of an interest to buy out the other stakeholders and claim ownership.
“We would rather 10,000 people own one little piece of a card than one person own, or five people own that at 20% each,” Vandenberg says. “If you can do that at volume, you’ve got a pretty interesting platform,” says Vasu Kulkarni, a partner at Courtside Ventures, which focuses on sports, fitness and gaming startups at the seed and Series A stages and which contributed $1 million to the Dibbs round.
Exchanging one fake thing for another fake thing. Welcome to 'reality'.