Painter Koceila Chougar
Koceila Chougar
“There is two kinds of art,” the painter Koceila Chougar said on the On The Margin podcast. “There is the most rarest art as master art, and there is the pop art that many people buy. But for me, I will tell you it’s a scam, because it’s not rare and the people want to collect this kind of art but there is no value because there is many of them.”
Chougar, who sells canvases for as much as $100,000 and describes himself as a “cultural spy,” was talking about the fine-art market. He could have been describing the thing that is quietly replacing it.
The top of the art market is in retreat. Global art sales fell 12% in 2024 to $57.5 billion, and works priced above $10 million dropped 39%, according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. Christie’s closed its dedicated digital-art department in September 2025 after none of its blockchain auctions since 2022 cleared $400,000. The NFT-art boom that was supposed to mint a new generation of collectors collapsed from $2.9 billion in sales in 2021 to $23.8 million in the first quarter of 2025.
Yet the speculative money did not disappear. It moved. And a lot of it went into a Brinks vault, attached to a Pokémon card.
The new rich do not buy art
Asked whether the new elite minted by technology, artificial intelligence and crypto were less interested in fine art than the older money made in finance, private equity and law, Chougar agreed with the premise but added a caveat about the very top.
“You start to earn money. You want a new car, new watch,” he said. “And at the top of that, there is art. The most richest of them, they need art. Not only to collect, but to tell to the others that they are cultural influencers, that they are collectors, that they are on the most refined part of the wealth.” He called it
“the cherry on the cake. C’est la cerise sur le gâteau, as we tell in French.”
For most newly wealthy buyers, the cherry no longer interests them. The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting found that Gen Z high-net-worth collectors spend roughly five times more on sneakers than any other generation, and direct the majority of their collectibles budget toward lifestyle objects rather than paintings. The same cohort that adopted crypto early grew up on trading cards, and it is treating them as an asset class.
The trading-card market was worth roughly $21.4 billion in 2024, according to a Market Decipher report. Target’s trading-card sales rose about 70% in 2025. Pokémon listings on StockX climbed 367% in the first half of the year. The nostalgia that drives that demand belongs to the same millennials who hold the crypto.
Chougar’s own explanation of why a Picasso appreciates maps onto a graded card. “The artist is dead. The number of artists is very limited. But in all of the time of the world, there is more and more people, more and more collectors, and more and more money,” he said. “When you have these two components, there is a high demand and there is a high volume of money, then the price will grow.”
Where the money went
The company that turned that logic into volume is Courtyard.io. A collector ships a card graded by PSA, BGS or CGC to an insured Brinks vault. Courtyard authenticates it, renders a 3D image, and mints an NFT on Polygon that trades on its own marketplace or on OpenSea. Burn the token and the physical card ships to your door.
In January 2024 the platform did about $50,000 a month in sales. By July 2025 it did $50 million a month, according to Fortune, which reported a $30 million Series A led by Forerunner Ventures, with NEA and Y Combinator returning from an earlier round. That August, blockchain trackers including DappRadar showed Courtyard ranking, for some weeks, as the largest NFT collection by volume, ahead of Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks.
On X, the people tracking the market describe it the way they once described token launches. “Tokenized Pokémon TCG volumes are going parabolic,” wrote AJC, an enterprise research manager at the crypto research firm Messari, in August. “Last month, the four main marketplaces facilitated $124.5 million in volume, a 5.5x increase from January. Courtyard is the top dog, with $78.4 million in volume in August.”
What buyers get for that is liquidity: a card locked in a vault can change hands at any hour, without being shipped, insured or re-authenticated for every sale.
The casino at the bottom
The same machinery runs a casino too. Collector Crypt, a rival on Solana, reported $146.9 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2026. Roughly 98.5% came not from trading cards but from “gacha” packs, randomized digital boxes that sell for $50 to $1,000 and pay out a card of uncertain value. Its CARDS token, up 2,400% within two weeks of its August 2025 launch, now trades about 90% below that peak.
“Digital repacks come with a lot of controversy,” Olivia Moore, a partner at the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in May. “It feels like gambling (regulation is TBD).”
The filmmaker Brandon Daley built a movie around that feeling. “$POSITIONS” follows a blue-collar Midwesterner who gambles his family’s savings into speculative cryptocurrencies and spirals into addiction. It premiered at SXSW in 2025 and reached Alamo Drafthouse theaters this year.
“A big theme in the movie is about how people kind of in poverty, people who grow up in small towns like I grew up in Kansas, are looking for hope,” Daley said on the On The Margin podcast. “Some people find that hope in lottery tickets. Some people find it in drug use. Some people find it in this new wave in cryptocurrency, where they’re like, this is going to fix my situation and get me out of this poverty trap. And a lot of those people end up falling prey to whatever those things are.”
Daley put a dollar sign in front of his title, a nod to stock tickers and cashtags. The market took it literally. After he posted the trailer on X and it drew 700,000 views, scammers launched a wave of “$POSITIONS” meme coins. One pumped, then rugged. “My DMs were full of people being like, what’s your Solana wallet, man,” he said.
When the film premiered in New York, Daley was not there. He watched an anonymous account promote the screening to pump a coin in his name. “Literally the only people who are sitting here thinking about my movie playing in New York City are me and this random scam artist from Indonesia,” he said. “And I felt connected to him.” He has refused to launch an official coin. “If I launch I won’t rug,” he said, “but I’m probably not gonna launch.”
The hole in the proof
Tokenization is sold as a trust upgrade. An immutable ledger records who owned a card and when, which fixes the resale-chain problem that long haunted physical collectibles. The grading happens before the card reaches the vault, though, and the ledger cannot check it.
PSA, the dominant grader, said it intercepted more than $200 million in counterfeit collectibles in 2025, with fake Pokémon submissions up 125%. In December 2025 the company faced its own grade-manipulation scandal, and some dealers suspended submissions.
Chougar made the same point about the art world, where galleries and museums hold expensive works they privately suspect are fakes. “There is many museums, they have artworks for many millions in their collection,” he said. “They couldn’t tell to the people, it’s fake one.” He is blunt about how easily authorship blurs. “I can have workers work for me in China. They make art for me. I just can sign it,” he said. “Is it my art or Chinese art?”
The collectors who left fine art for the blockchain got the liquidity they wanted. They did not leave the forgery problem behind.
Vignesh Sundaresan, the investor who paid $69.3 million for Beeple’s NFT at Christie’s in 2021, still champions digital art but has spent the years since building physical galleries in Singapore. “I really find that I’m happier, I’m more peaceful, when life is physical,” he told CNN this year.
Daley, who watched a film about crypto gambling spawn the real thing, is not waiting for the technology to redeem anyone. “I feel like the only people that win really are insiders,” he said. “You know the person that’s gonna launch the coin, or you’re part of the team, or you’re super early. And everyone else is caught holding the bag.”
