XPUNKs Creator Kaj Leroy Sees Trading Card Boom After 100,000 XRP Booster Packs Burned

Kaj Leroy's Trading Card Call

Kaj Leroy, the developer known online as Brad Punkhouse who created XPUNKs, the first major NFT collection built on XRP, expects Web3 gaming to enter a trading card game boom that draws in venture funds and specialized ETFs over the coming years. He set out the thesis in a post on X, arguing that the sector is pivoting toward hybrid products at the intersection of the physical world and the blockchain while most of the market looks elsewhere. A longtime builder in the XRP ecosystem, he frames the niche as an early-stage bull market that participants have largely missed, regardless of where the XRP price chart sits. Trading card games, the century-old physical hobby that Pokémon turned into a global franchise, are the format he expects crypto to collide with next. A hybrid TCG, in his description, pairs digital ownership recorded on a ledger with physical cards that are manufactured, shipped and opened like any retail product, with the ledger handling ownership and resale. He treats the gap between what builders are shipping and what the market is watching as the core opportunity. “Trading cards have been around for over a century, so none of this is new. What’s new is crypto catching on,” Leroy wrote. In his reading, the mass market wants tangible assets because “normies want something easy to understand that they can hold in their hands.” Physical cards and the ritual of tearing open real booster packs, he argued, hold users far longer than passively watching the chart of a profile-picture collection, and the social bonds formed around pack openings run deeper than anything a purely digital drop produces.

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Fuzzycards, Yuga Labs and the Brands Ahead

The proof he offers sits in numbers from his own project. Fuzzycards, the hybrid card game Leroy runs on the XRP Ledger, issued roughly 100,000 booster packs, and holders of the matching NFTs burned them to have physical cards delivered, a flow he treats as direct evidence that collectors value the paper version enough to give up the token. The mechanic has already crossed into other ecosystems: Yuga Labs launched Mudwater cards on Solana, with each real pack held in storage tied to an NFT, and Leroy reads that launch as confirmation that the burn-for-physical model is being institutionalized. He places the current moment alongside the rise of the Pokémon franchise in the 1990s, when a physical collectible grew into a generational market, and he expects large brands to follow the same path onchain. Mario, Harry Potter and Tolkien's Middle-earth, in his estimate, will eventually move their trading card games onto onchain rails to control secondary-market trading volume. Difficulty works in the sector's favor as well. “The hardest part isn’t the art or the hype. It’s building a game that’s actually fun and actually works,” he noted, adding that the combinatorics of a 150-card deck exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe and that balancing them absorbs serious resources. Teams that started early hold an edge in logistics and production, because “physical products take way more time than anything onchain.” He closed with a forecast aimed squarely at capital: “Next comes TCG ETFs, hedge funds, VCs and much more. The market is about to get a lot bigger. We’re early.”

Institutional Rails Around XRP Already Exist

Read against what already exists around XRP, the forecast lands on prepared ground. The ETF channel Leroy describes is live for the token itself: Bitwise's XRP ETF holds net assets above $541 million, even after the product group booked their first weekly outflow in 13 weeks at $1.84 million. The ledger keeps shipping as well, with the fixCleanup3_4_0 security fix locked for October 23 activation, while futures open interest has cooled to $2.77 billion. Leroy's missed-trend framing runs the psychology of FOMO in reverse. Our read: consumer apps like Fuzzycards will be judged on retention numbers rather than narratives, and if hybrid cards hold users the way he claims, venture capital has a concrete use case to underwrite.