Polygon fills against Solana asks

The same graded card is vaulted on two chains whose markets never see each other's prices. One side is what somebody paid, the other is what somebody is asking, and the gap is not free money.

1. 01

   Two kinds of fact

   Courtyard settles completed sales on chain and keeps its order book off it, so its number is a price PAID. Collector Crypt lists on chain, so its number is a price ASKED. Every label on the page says which, because a reader who assumes ask-versus-ask draws exactly the wrong conclusion.

2. 02

   Lined up by card

   Same year, same number, same name, same grade — matched on the identifying fields, never on the name alone. Where the two sides disagree about the set, the pair is dropped rather than shown.

   Rows with an ask far above the venue's own insured value, or a sale far below it, are hidden by default. Those are usually a mismatched card or a lot sold as one, not a bargain.

3. 03

   Why the gap exists

   Across the whole dataset asks run about one and a half times a card's insured value while sales clear at about four fifths of it. Most of what looks like a spread is the difference between hoping and paying.

4. 04

   Why it is not free money

   A card bought on one chain cannot simply appear on the other. It has to be redeemed, shipped insured, and re-vaulted by a different custodian — days or weeks, with a fee at each step. The tokenize page now quotes those steps, one of them from our own receipt, and usually says don't.

   What the trip costs →

5. 05

   Watch it being done

   Two of our own cards are making that trip in public — one bought as a Polygon token, one bought physically — with every cost written down as it is paid, including the ones we cannot price yet, which are marked rather than estimated.

   The journey →

Data comes from slabbasis, which reads both chains directly. Nothing on the page is a recommendation to buy anything.