There Is No Ticker for a Labubu
I’ve spent the last year on WealthRelay, a valuation API: portfolios, trades, instrument prices, returns, currency conversion, all behind GraphQL. It has the problem every B2B API has at the start. The first customer doesn’t exist yet, and until one does, every design decision is a guess about what the API is for. So I became the first customer. I collect things - sealed Pokémon product mostly, which I track in Collectr - and the collectibles that have genuinely behaved like an asset class these last couple of years are POP MART blind boxes. A set is twelve figures. One of them is the secret, which you can’t see through the box, and which sells on eBay for a multiple of its siblings. People buy whole cases to complete sets, trade their duplicates, and argue about what their shelf is worth. Every tracker I found answered that with a checklist. None of them treated the shelf as what it is: a portfolio, with a cost basis, a market value and a return. ...