Venture Capitalist Claims Pokémon Cards Would Become Global Currency After Apocalypse

A venture capitalist who oversees $1.6 billion in gaming assets made a striking claim this week: if civilization collapsed tomorrow, Pokémon cards would become the world's currency by the next day. The man behind the prediction, who personally owns roughly 500,000 trading cards, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about what he sees as an inevitable economic reality rooted in the franchise's global reach and the cards' proven investment performance.

The numbers supporting his thesis are difficult to ignore. Pokémon cards have appreciated at a rate that outpaces the S&P 500 by 3,000 percent. The franchise itself emerged from Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, experienced a peak and a trough, and has since entered what he describes as a parabolic growth curve—a trajectory that has fueled international expansion of the trading card market. For someone holding a substantial collection, the financial case is straightforward: these pieces of cardboard have become one of the most reliable stores of value in recent memory.

But the venture capitalist's confidence rests on more than raw returns. The infrastructure now exists to make Pokémon cards function as currency. Card grading companies like PSA have standardized quality ratings and authenticate cards, creating a system where each card carries a clearly quantifiable value. A Charizard or a Pikachu Illustrator is no longer just a collectible—it is a graded, verified asset with a price the market will bear. In a post-collapse scenario, he argues, this standardization would provide the kind of trust and transparency that any functional currency requires.

The other force driving his conviction is demographic. Adults now account for roughly 30 percent of global toy sales, a share that continues to climb. This is the "kidult" phenomenon: a generation that grew up with Pokémon, video games, trading cards, and comic books has reached adulthood with disposable income. Nostalgia has become purchasing power. The franchise has transformed from a children's product into a multi-generational asset class, and that shift has created a massive, sustained market that shows no signs of contracting.

Yet the very success that makes Pokémon cards attractive as a hedge against civilizational collapse has created acute real-world problems. The market is strangled by scarcity. Despite The Pokémon Company printing 10 billion cards last year alone, new releases sell out immediately. Scalpers and thieves have made the hobby a target. Target has begun slicing open booster boxes to discourage resellers. In Japan, some releases are restricted to Japanese residents only, and facial recognition systems have been deployed in certain locations to cap how many cards an individual can purchase in a day. The company appears either unable or unwilling to meet demand, even at production levels that would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago.

The venture capitalist's apocalypse scenario may be tongue-in-cheek, but it reflects a genuine shift in how people think about Pokémon cards. They are no longer primarily toys or collectibles in the traditional sense. They are financial instruments, stores of value, and increasingly, objects of scarcity-driven speculation. Whether that makes them suitable as post-apocalyptic currency is a question that may never be answered. What is clear is that the conditions he describes—global recognition, standardized valuation, and a generation with both emotional attachment and real money—have already transformed these cards into something far more consequential than their creators likely imagined.