While in college in late 2019, he set aside a hustle trading rare sneakers to buy a rookie of Luka Doncic, the Dallas Mavericks’ young phenom. The card’s value kept ticking upward, so Tamaddon bought more and more copies of the same card — 35 in all, he says, with slight and increasingly rare variations and colors. It was fun to sell and trade, he says, the rush a little addictive. So he kept buying new cards, following new athletes and sports, and trading them for more valuable ones. He emptied his savings account, quit his job cleaning hotel pools, set aside his dream of owning an aquatics business — all for the dustiest of hobbies, thin cardboard assets in a blockchain world.

Source: Washington Post July 14, 2021 13:07 UTC