The exploding business of digital collectibles is getting another heavyweight entrant.
PrizePicks, the fantasy sports platform owned by global gambling operator Allwyn, has launched PrizePicks Packs where users pay to open a virtual card pack in exchange for a random card valued anywhere from 30 cents to several million dollars.
To seed the service, PrizePicks recently acquired the most talked-about card of the year featuring NBA star Cooper Flagg. The card was bought in a September auction run by Fanatics for a record $8 million; the sale, to a previously unidentified buyer, was seen as the latest sign of a booming market for sports collectibles.
PrizePicks' involvement suggests the hot demand is being driven, at least in part, by the new virtual card packs category.
Several multibillion-dollar businesses, including Fanatics and GameStop, are racing to build card collections that they can offer through their platforms, which resemble online slot machines. Barron's has previously identified more than 50 of these so-called digital rips platforms.
PrizePicks' European parent, Allwyn, is one of the largest betting businesses in the world. It operates Powerball in the U.K. and runs lotteries on behalf of Austria and the state of Illinois. Its entry into the digital trading card pack market signals that collectibles are the next frontier in gambling.
"We always want to push the sports entertainment experience forward and that is exactly what we are doing with the launch of Packs," PrizePicks CEO Mike Ybarra said in a press release.
Others in the gambling space are hopping on the trend: Underdog, a fantasy-sports competitor to PrizePicks, launched Underdog Rips in September; DraftKings' venture-capital arm is a backer of digital rips platform Triumph; Coinbase, the brokerage platform that offers sports betting through prediction markets, has also teased its own digital rips.
The products are a natural fit for gambling operators, according to Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, a gambling industry research firm. Digital rips "sell a randomized outcome with a physical prize, and the operator margin sits in pack pricing against expected value. Operators already run this math every day," Eilers & Krejcik wrote in an August report on the collectibles industry. "The category is now too large, too gaming-like and too strategically relevant to ignore."
While PrizePicks isn't the first entrant to the space, the launch of its Packs product on Wednesday is sure to make a splash, especially with the chance of winning the Cooper Flagg card.
Embedded in the card is a patch from the jersey Flagg wore in his NBA debut in 2025. After being discovered in a physical card pack, Flagg's card was sold at a Fanatics auction in late September for just over $8 million -- the most ever paid for an individual basketball card.
At the time, no buyer was identified. PrizePicks says it acquired the Flagg card from a third party after the auction. It also secured two other basketball cards that sold at the auction, for $2.9 million and $2.3 million. All three of those cards, plus a rare Pokémon card, are now among the cards available in PrizePicks Packs.
PrizePicks' digital rips start as low as $1 per pack, all the way up to a $2,500 pack.
To be sure, most of the cards users can win on PrizePicks don't have multimillion-dollar price tags.
In a product demonstration for Barron's, PrizePicks senior vice president of product Dylan Cooper shared his phone screen and opened three $50 card packs; the cards he won were worth $15, $30, and $50. Upon opening, users can get the physical card shipped to them or sell it back to PrizePicks for 100% of a fair market value determined by Card Ladder, which tracks trading card sales.
Barron's previous reporting on digital rips found that they resemble a gambling product: the customer pays for a random chance to win a prize of monetary value.
Jason Barclay, PrizePicks' chief legal officer, tells Barron's that the company spent significant time on the issue before launching PrizePicks Packs.
Barclay says he spoke with gambling regulators and sent every state attorney general in the U.S. a briefing on PrizePicks' plans, a proactive move to address concerns around gambling.
"This is much more like an e-commerce transaction than it is a form of gambling," Barclay says, drawing parallels to the age-old tradition of opening a physical pack of baseball cards.
Still, Barclay says "we recognize that anything in the sports entertainment space can be subject to abuse, can be subject to addiction."
About half of Wednesday's press release announcing PrizePicks Packs is dedicated to consumer protection measures that come with the product: Customers need to be 18 years old and the app has built in deposit limits. Users have the option to cut themselves off, a casino-industry practice known as self-exclusion. PrizePicks will also pay for customers to see a behavioral health specialist from Kindbridge, a virtual treatment provider, should they need it.
Gambling or not, the trading card market has certainly become speculative. An index of trading card values tracked by Card Ladder is outpacing the S&P 500.
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