The Community Behind the Hobby's Biggest Weekend
In 2021, Whatnot showed up to the National Sports Collectors Convention with a 10-foot-by-10-foot booth. One table. Most people walking the floor had never heard of us.
We've been back every year since, each one bigger than the last. This year we're coming with a 20,000-square-foot space. The distance between that first table and where we are now isn't a story about us. It's about the community that made Whatnot the home of the hobby.
Where the hobby lives
The hobby found a home on Whatnot fast, and the scale of it now is hard to overstate. Four cards are sold every second, and the number of shows earning more than $100,000 in card sales has climbed over 80% in the past year.
Behind those numbers are people: the seller who knows every rookie in the set, the collector who finally tracks down the single they've looked for for years, the buyers who show up week after week for the same show. The hobby has always been about the people in it. Live selling opened new ways to connect, and everything we've built, we've built with the community.
The hobby became a career
Not long ago, making real money in cards meant a storefront, a spot on the show circuit, and the overhead of both. Live commerce changed that. Someone with deep knowledge of a player, a set, or an era can now build an audience and a business from wherever they are, across singles, vintage, breaks, and everything in between. Three in five sports card sellers on Whatnot made their first sale on the platform this year, and the seller base has grown by nearly half.
Dakota is one of them. A year ago, she became the first woman to sell more than $1 million in a single week on Whatnot. At 25, selling sports cards out of Boca Raton, she was already one of the highest-grossing sports card sellers in the world. Now 26, she's built adudehits into one of live commerce's biggest operations, with more than 50 employees across a dozen channels, and sold nearly $65M on Whatnot in 2025.
Jack, who runs topfloor, took a longer road. He was a music engineer before he turned toward cards, a category he'd grown up around thanks to his dad's vintage collection. He tried launching a grading company, then tried building his own site to buy and sell cards. Neither worked out. So the 29-year-old from Olympia gave Whatnot a shot in April 2025, did a $10,000 night his first weekend, and knew he was onto something. He now runs the business with a team of eight, and is planning to open a card shop in Seattle so the community that watches his shows can meet the team in person.
Then there's the scale of what's possible. Reid has spent more than five years turning Bleacher Breaks into one of Whatnot's standout collectibles businesses, spanning sports cards, coins and bullion, and trading card games across a dozen channels. The team is now 70 people, and the business has already served nearly as many customers in 2026 as it did in all of 2025, with order volume close to double what it was this time last year.
Driven by the Hobby
For more than 40 years, the National has been the center of the card world, a floor shaped by dealers who've earned their place over decades. That history is part of what makes the show special. What's changed is how many more people get to be in the room. This year, we're giving our sellers more of that floor than ever.
The Whatnot Live Center gives our sellers space to do at the National what they do every other night of the year. They'll be going live right from the showroom floor all week, across every corner of the hobby, in front of the audiences they've built on Whatnot. There's a main stage with programming throughout the show, a merch shop, driving simulators, and a photo booth that turns your picture into a slabbed keepsake. And yes, we're giving away a car.
That car headlines the Whatnot Giveaway Show, live from the Live Center on August 1 at 1:00 PM PT / 4:00 PM CT / 5:00 PM ET, where sellers will give away more than $150,000 in prizes. No purchase necessary, and you can enter right from the show. Save the show so you don't miss the Porsche giveaway.
For a lot of these sellers, a booth at The National was never really an option before. Live selling changed that, and this year they aren't watching the biggest weekend in the hobby from the outside. They're at the center of it.
The best part is you don't have to be in Chicago to be part of it. Everything happening on the floor is happening live on Whatnot, so collectors anywhere can tune in, jump in the chat, and shop alongside the community the way they do every other day of the year.
