About

The trust layer for high-value TCG.

WATCHER exists because the high-value trading card market has an unsolved trust problem. Collectors move six-figure sums for single cards — often between strangers, over Discord, with no institutional backing.

The Problem

A PSA 10 Charizard 1st Edition sold for $420,000 in 2022. The buyer wired the money after a video call and a few screenshots. There was no verifiable chain of custody, no way to confirm the grade certificate hadn’t been swapped, and no neutral record of the sale history.

This happens thousands of times a year at lower price points. Buyers rely on reputation, hope, and platform dispute processes that were built for $40 sneakers, not $40,000 cards.

What WATCHER Is

WATCHER is a provenance page — a single, permanent URL that answers the three questions any serious buyer needs answered in the first 8 seconds:

✓
Is this card real?
Grader cert number, fingerprint hash, and binding tier are all displayed and sourced.
✓
What is its sale history?
Every transaction is recorded with verification tier, evidence links, and wallet flow where available.
✓
Is the current owner credible?
Trust score, member tenure, and verified sale count give buyers a fast signal on counterparty risk.

WATCHER is the record, not the store. We don't facilitate transactions, hold escrow, or take a cut — we capture what happened to a card, sourced as rigorously as possible, and make that record permanently verifiable by anyone before they buy.

How records are backed

Every record starts owner-attested from a photo, and any owner can mint a free digital Certified seal on top. Physical tamper-evident stickers and on-chain anchoring come later.

◉Photo record (owner-attested) — live

The owner enrolls the card from a photo. We store a SHA-256 content hash of that exact image and bind it into the provenance chain, so the picture on the page is provably the one enrolled. It's owner-attested — a claim, not independent authentication.

◆Digital Certified seal — live & free

A one-tap, free holographic seal with a unique serial, signed by WATCHER. It's a signed certificate of the record + ownership at that moment — shown on your profile and card page, and downloadable to share. Not a physical bind, not authentication of the card. It upgrades to an on-chain proof when anchoring ships.

◈Physical holographic sticker — V2

Coming in V2: a holographic, tamper-evident QR sticker applied to the slab or case, serialized and destroy-on-removal, so scanning proves the physical item is bound to its record. (Currently a waitlist.)

Design Principles

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Every claim is sourced. We actively link out to PSA, BGS, BaseScan, and auction archives. Trust comes from transparency about not being the only source of truth.
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The verdict is glanceable. Owner-attested, Verified, or Authenticated by binding tier — plus Stale, Disputed, and Burned. A buyer reads it once and knows exactly how strongly the record is backed.
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Zero social features. No likes, comments, follows, or feeds. The product is the page, not the platform.
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Hashes are shown raw. Every fingerprint hash and contract address is displayed in monospace, unmodified. We don't pretty-print cryptographic data.
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Mobile first. The primary use case is a buyer on their phone during a Discord call. The page is optimized for that moment.

v1 Scope

Version 1 is deliberately focused on two things: enrollment and digital Certified seals. Anyone can self-enroll a high-value card from a photo — creating a free, owner-attested provenance page — and mint a free holographic Certified seal (a signed, serial-numbered certificate shown on their profile and shareable anywhere). No marketplace, no escrow, no payments: WATCHER is the record. Physical tamper-evident stickers and on-chain anchoring land in V2. The goal is to prove a provenance page meaningfully changes buyer confidence before adding any other surface area.

See how enrollment works →
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