Industry Spotlight

For most of Jeff Newman's career, cards were his hobby and technology was his profession. In 2026, he brought the two together.

Newman is the co-founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of CardWire, a new newsroom and market data company covering sports cards and trading card games. The company is built around a problem Newman sees in the modern card market: there is more information than ever, but much of it remains scattered across marketplaces, auction houses, social media, livestreams and card shops.

CardWire wants to bring that information together - combining news, prices, research and data in one place.

"CardWire is the newsroom building the card market's reference price," he says.

From Pokémon collector to product builder

Newman's connection to cards began with Pokémon when he was nine years old.

He sees collecting as part of a much older human instinct: finding, organizing and sharing things that matter to us. Cards happen to package that instinct particularly well. They're small, tangible and easy to collect, organize and share with friends.

While at space camp, Newman traded his first-edition Gyarados for another kid's shadowless Charizard. Years later, after his own children were born and he returned more seriously to collecting, he sent the Charizard to PSA.

It graded an 8. "My first grail," he says.

Professionally, Newman took a different path. He spent approximately 15 years building products for marketplaces, livestreamers and creators, and trading platforms, with experience including Kraken, Scopely, Magic Eden and the NFL.

Seeing an information gap in cards

Newman sees similarities between today's card market and the early cryptocurrency market around 2011 to 2013 - particularly in the way information and pricing are fragmented.

"The data is scattered across auction houses, eBay, marketplaces and shops, and nobody publishes a price the whole market trusts," Newman says. "CardWire exists to fix that."

He also sees parallels between cards and some of the ideas that initially attracted people to digital collectibles: provenance, scarcity, artwork and the stories attached to individual assets. Cards, however, come with established sports and entertainment brands and generations of collecting culture.

CardWire went live on September 16, 2026. CardWire published more than 230 stories and wires in its first two months.

Newman runs the news desk and leads product, go-to-market strategy, business development and partnerships.

The initial focus includes Pokémon, One Piece, the NBA, NFL and MLB.

Building trust alongside the data

For Newman, trust is central to what CardWire is building.

Newman believes CardWire's independence will matter more as the company builds its news and pricing products.

"Because our reporting is independent, people can take our news and our prices seriously."

News capable of affecting the market can originate on social media, in an auction listing or during a livestream. At the same time, many people producing card content are also buying, selling, breaking, consigning or promoting products.

Newman believes there is room for a platform focused on helping collectors distinguish market information and analysis from promotion.

"Cards have always been an investment; the label just masked it," he says.

Cards can sell for millions, institutional capital has entered grading and selling businesses, and collectors routinely check price histories before buying.

Moving beyond the comp

One of the biggest changes Newman expects next involves something collectors already do constantly: comping cards.

For decades, collectors relied heavily on printed price guides such as Beckett. Today, technology can help identify a card and surface recent comparable sales within seconds.

As those tools become increasingly common, Newman believes basic comping will become a commodity.

The more valuable layer will be helping collectors understand what the number means.

"Should I buy, hold, sell or grade, and why did the price move?" Newman says.

Newman also sees consolidation reshaping the business side of the hobby, including card shop groups acquiring stores and expanding from city to city.

Together, those developments point toward a card industry becoming larger, more sophisticated and increasingly driven by data.

What's next

CardWire's planned card pages are intended to combine the CardWire Value with pricing over time and the news that moved the market, while helping collectors think through whether to buy, hold, sell or grade.

As pricing data becomes easier to obtain, context becomes more valuable. What caused a price to move? Is the movement meaningful? What information should a collector consider before making the next decision?

"Anyone can look up a card's last sale," Newman says. "We want to tell collectors what that sale means for today's price and why it moved."

Why Jeff Newman matters to the card industry

Collectors can find sales results, listings, population reports, videos, social posts, auction results and breaking news throughout the day. The challenge increasingly is organizing that information and deciding what actually matters.

He is a lifelong collector who spent approximately 15 years building technology products for marketplaces, creators and trading platforms. CardWire brings those experiences together in a company that sits between media, data and technology.

Away from the business, Newman spends much of his time with his wife and two young boys. He calls this the family's "youth sports arc of life," with jiu-jitsu, soccer and baseball filling their schedule. Having played ball himself growing up, Newman now coaches his sons.

"Memories that we'll all hold dear for the rest of our lives," he says.

"Every card should have a price collectors can trust," Newman says. "We want CardWire to be the place that reports it."