PKMN, the first index

Ask a collector which category moves first and the answer comes before you finish the question. The grading queues say the same: of the 26.6 million cards graded across the major authenticators in 2025, 16.1 million were Pokémon (GemRate via Yahoo Sports, Jan 2026). PKMN is the index on that category: one level for graded Pokémon cards, built from real sales. It is the first tradable index on the Quanta board and the first market on the DEX, at /trade/PKMN, and every index page follows the sections below.

Coverage

PKMN covers graded Pokémon cards. Each constituent is one card, at one grade, from one grader. A PSA 10 and a PSA 9 of the same card are two constituents, because the market prices them as two different objects. The board level and its full history come from Card Ladder sales data, which tracks graded card sales across the major marketplaces and auction houses; Card Ladder's Pokémon index covers 9,591 cards (Card Ladder, as of 15 Sep 2026). Vaulted cards that sell for USDC on a public blockchain (Polygon) form the on-chain record the index engine reads, and how such a sale is recorded is explained in The data source.

Which cards enter the index is decided by rules, not fame. A card is a constituent because it trades often, between enough distinct buyers and sellers, above a minimum value, and it stays while it keeps doing so. The reasons behind each rule are in Methodology principles. The venues PKMN reads, its thresholds and its review schedule are set out in its published specification.

PKMN is one price for the whole category. Constituent, level and ticker are defined in What is a Quanta index.

Why this category

An index needs density: every constituent has to produce enough real sales, from enough different hands, for a median to mean something. Graded Pokémon is where that density runs deepest.

On the public catalog of one vaulting venue, 256,373 of about 376,000 listed items, roughly 68%, were Pokémon cards (venue catalog, 15 Sep 2026). The same venue recorded more than 50,000 on-chain trades a day on many days in 2026 (Privy, Aug 2026).

Pokémon came first because the data was there first. Other categories follow the same measurement, in the order the data supports: see The index family.

What is published

Everything a third party needs to recompute PKMN is public.

Item	What it contains
Specification	The formula, every parameter, threshold and window, the review schedule and the base level. Versioned.
Constituent list	Each card with its grader, grade, set and number.
Dictionary	The frozen mapping from each on-chain token to its card, committed per epoch.
Commitments	Periodic Merkle roots, so a recomputation can be checked against what was published.
Level and history	The level in dollars, to two decimals, from a $1.00 base in May 2004, refreshed daily, with its full history.

The level and its history are on the index page and in the public feed: https://tradequanta.xyz/api/indexes returns the board snapshot, and https://tradequanta.xyz/api/indexes/history/pokemon returns the full PKMN history as [date, level] points. Fetching the archive and checking a recomputation is covered in Data and API.

Segments

Vintage, modern and ultra modern Pokémon each have their own level on the board: PKMN-V, PKMN-M and PKMN-U. A segment is a full index in its own right, with its own specification, constituent list and commitments, and it earns its place the way the parent did: measured, not decided. Each segment's specification sets where its era begins and ends.

Trading

The DEX runs a perpetual market on PKMN: long or short, with leverage up to 20x, each position on its own isolated margin, so your loss on a position is capped at the margin on that position. You deposit USDC from a Solana wallet as collateral, and margin, fees and profit and loss are all kept in that same USDC. The matching engine holds the mark price inside a narrow band around the index, so the contract stays anchored to PKMN.

How the venue works is in The DEX, how the band is enforced in Index price, mark price, last price, and how margin, leverage and liquidation work in Margin, leverage and liquidation. The market itself is at /trade/PKMN.

Sources for this page are listed in Sources.