What Is Dibbs?

Dibbs was a New York startup, founded in 2021 by Evan Vandenberg, that ran a real-time marketplace for buying and selling fractional sharesof individual sports cards. Instead of paying full price for a card, a collector could buy any percentage stake in a specific vaulted card — a Patrick Mahomes rookie, a PSA 10 LeBron James — and trade that stake instantly, 24/7, the way you'd trade a stock. The company raised $2.8 million in seed funding in March 2021 and a $13 million Series A that July, roughly $15.8 million total. It shut down the consumer marketplace in March 2023 to focus entirely on a separate B2B business, and the company was later acquired by Bastion in February 2025. There is no active Dibbs card marketplace today.

• Cards were vaulted, not shipped.Dibbs held the physical card — typically already professionally graded — in its own secure storage. Ownership existed only as a digital record, so nothing physical moved when a stake changed hands.
• Shares were issued as NFTs.Each card's fractional ownership was tracked on-chain, which Dibbs used to settle trades instantly instead of the days a traditional auction or private sale takes to clear.
• Trading was continuous, not auction-based.A collector could buy or sell a stake at any time the market was open, rather than waiting for a scheduled auction to end — the pitch was liquidity on cards that are normally illiquid, especially six-figure vintage or rookie pieces most people can never afford outright.
• Backing came from hobby and venture investors. Seed investors included Courtside Ventures, Sport Card Investor, Founder Collective, and JD Sports, among other angels, ahead of the larger Series A round that summer.

Dibbs closed its consumer card marketplace abruptly in March 2023, about two years after launch. The company said the decision was a strategic pivot rather than a failure of the fractional-ownership idea itself — Dibbs redirected its resources toward Tokenization-as-a-Service, licensing its vaulting-and-blockchain infrastructure to other brands and platforms instead of running its own consumer-facing card market. That B2B pivot is what carried the company forward: it was later acquired by Bastion in February 2025, and it continues to operate in that infrastructure business, not as a place collectors can buy or sell cards.

• Whole-card ownership is still the default. Marketplaces like eBay, COMC, and MySlabs sell you the entire physical card, which you can hold, ship, or resell on your own terms — no dependency on a platform staying in business to redeem your position.
• Vaulting solves the shipping problem without slicing up ownership.Services like PSA Vault and the eBay Vault store a card securely and let sales settle instantly between vault users, but you still own 100% of the card — see What Is Sports Card Vaulting? for how that differs from what Dibbs offered.
• Fractional platforms carry platform risk. Dibbs is the clearest example in the hobby: a well-funded, well-covered startup that still wound its marketplace down within two years. Any fractional-ownership stake is only as good as the company running the vault and the ledger behind it — worth weighing against full ownership of a physical card you control directly.

Dibbs's marketplace app may still appear in app store listings even though it no longer functions as a trading platform. If you held a balance or fractional shares when the marketplace closed, the company's own wind-down communications from March 2023 are the authoritative source on what happened to outstanding positions — this guide covers the marketplace's history and how it worked, not account-specific recovery steps.

Confirm the exact card with Identify & Research — free-path first (on-device OCR, catalog match, and fingerprints). For a fractional platform that's still operating today, see What Is Rally? — a different legal structure (SEC-qualified equity shares instead of NFT-tracked fractions) with its own tradeoffs. For the full-ownership alternative to fractional shares, see What Is Sports Card Vaulting? For a marketplace built only for graded cards you own outright, see What Is MySlabs? For red flags to weigh on any platform holding your cards or money, see How to Avoid Sports Card Buying Scams, or open the full guides library.