Authentication and storage are turning paper into an “asset”
With grading volume now at the 20-million-cards scale, which steps—and which pricing—can printers realistically take on?
The same card becomes a different kind of object once it’s graded and sealed in a slab. What’s growing fastest isn’t the cardboard itself, but the “trust” created by authentication and storage. The question for printing companies is how much of the materials and workflows that support that trust can be pulled into real, repeatable work.
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Translated from Japanese by AI. The Japanese original is authoritative.
PSA’s throughput has expanded by roughly 10x in five years
PSA, the largest grading company, shows the growth in graded card volume in an official post. It lists 2 million cards in 2020 and more than 19 million cards in 2025.
That post does not specify whether the figures refer to submissions received or cards fully processed. In this article we treat them as the grading volumes PSA published.…
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Sources
- Grand View Research
- バンダイナムコホールディングス（Integrated Report 2025）
- PSA（Professional Sports Authenticator）
- Sports Illustrated（GemRateデータに基づく旨の記載）
- PokéBeach / 2024-05-24
- SNKRDUNK Magazine / 2025-05-26
- Fanatics Collect（サポート）
- Fanatics（Investor Relations） / 2024-01-01
- eBay（Investor Relations） / 2022-10-31
- PSA（FAQ / PSA Japan）
- CWA（Communications Workers of America）
- PokéBeach / 2021-12-01
- PokéBeach / 2022-01-01
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