Dynamics Inc., a security and technology collectible platform firm, announced the launch of The Authority, a real-time, vertically integrated, multi-category collectible ecommerce platform.
The Authority enables users to instantly vault, purchase, encapsulate, authenticate, grade, sell, and fulfill a collectible within minutes.
In another groundbreaking advancement for the collectibles industry, Dynamics is introducing the industry’s first Universal Public Grading Standard. For the first time, this gives collectors clear, consistent criteria behind each grade.
The Authority is a real-time retailer integration, encapsulation, grading, buy/sell marketplace, and fulfillment all on a single platform. The Authority is the first trusted, vaulted marketplace for pre-authenticated trading cards, TCGs, comics, figurines, memorabilia, and associated CoAs.
“The golden age of collectibles is happening right now,” said Jeffrey Mullen, CEO of Dynamics. “This is a game-changing, first-of-its-kind ecosystem that will transform the collectible industry at large. Collectors now have full visibility into the exact criteria behind each grade, at a fraction of the time and cost, enabling them to assess a collectible’s potential with confidence before it’s submitted. We plan to use the industry’s first public grading standard to teach millions of collectors how to grade their collectibles with precision and consistency.”
You can have a collectible graded and authenticated and shipped back to your home. But you can also “vault” it and list it in the marketplace. Someone else can buy it and own it, without a need to have it shipped to them. They can hold it in the vault at the company and list it in the marketplace again.
“I carry around with me about 300,000 collectibles on our platforms, and I have a large number of collectibles at home,” Mullen said. “If I was at dinner Saturday night and someone was a collector, and if he asked me how many Sidney Crosby cards I had at home, I would have no idea. But when it’s on your phone, I can type in Sidney Crosby and I can say, hey, I have 84 cards. Here they are. Would you like one? And I could just say, mail it to him. I could move it from my account to his account, exchange money.”
Despite the use of humans, Mullen said that the grading can be done quickly. Using the mobile app, you can press “grade” on a card and it will be pre-authenticated in a trusted marketplace using an open grading standard.
Dynamics’ evolution as a company
This is the latest turn of a multifaceted tech company that has raised more than $100 million and employed more than 200 people in the once steel-focused city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A grad of Carnegie Mellon University, Mullen was 27 when he started Dynamics. Now he is 47.
“Things started off doing super high-end flexible electronics, which we still do. During the pandemic, we used that to basically make some of the most impactful directed energy to inactivate RNA and DNA in air in real time,” he said.
During lockdown, he said, “We really wanted to figure out how we could use our technologies to help people. And so, we have a seven-acre manufacturing facility in Chesapeake, Pennsylvania.”
While Dynamics has taken on large projects, the company hasn’t had to raise money in the last decade. The firm is generating money from its own products, and Dynamics is using that to expand and hire really senior people, Mullen said.
While tariffs have hit all manufacturers, Dynamics has some protection. The company still has to buy raw materials from other countries, but it assembles its products in Pittsburgh and can designate them as made in the U.S. Because its expertise spans manufacturing, flexible electronics, chip design and security tech, Dynamics has to have multi-disciplinary engineers who can understand the whole tech stack.
Building the Authority
And now he’s working on The Authority. Five years ago, the code name for the project was Cybertron because of all of the technology that was needed to do the job.
“The Authority is something we worked on for the half decade, and it is a continuation of some of our earlier technologies. So back when we launched our first interactive payment card, one of our partners was Upper Deck,” he said. “We built one of the first tokenization systems for collectibles. Back in 2011 and 2012, it was really the first system where you could tokenize collectibles. They were physical collectibles, but we digitally tokenized them. We kept track of them on private ledgers, and it was all payment-level security and payments-level processing in terms of speed and stability.”
The Upper Deck project helped the company figure out how to approach the tasks of grading and authenticating collectibles. And that gave Mullen the incentive to expand to more collectibles. But it meant he had to develop a lot of tech.
“This is really where kind of the rubber hit the road. And we needed to rely on every technology background we had. We had to rely on high-volume, fully-automated manufacturing. We built our own robots here for manufacturing. We make our own chips that are in these products.”
The multiple-category platform is launching with more than nine million vaulted and authenticated trading cards, TCGs, comics, and figurines, making it the largest authenticated vaulted marketplace in the world.
The Authority promises grading – not guessing – using a public grading standard that produces an instant, consistent result, and at a low consumer price point. Items can be added to a user’s Authority account in two ways:.
- Transfer instantly from a participating channel retailer: By selecting Vault With The
Authority at transfer, items appear in users’ Authority account within seconds. Items
are then available to be sold in the Authority Marketplace, instantly graded using Reveal Grade, or immediately shipped to users’ homes. - Ship an item to The Authority: Items will be authenticated, graded, encapsulated, and vaulted and available to be sold, graded or shipped. Collectors can also select to vault trading cards raw without using the authentication and encapsulation service.
The Authority Marketplace is a pre-identified and pre-authenticated marketplace that
eliminates fraud and misleading descriptions. Direct retailer connections let eligible purchases move into The Authority instantly.
“We’re launching The Authority. We have received and have vaulted over nine million collectibles in preparation for the launch. These are collectibles such as trading cards, comic books, action figures,” he said. “What we do is we encapsulate them in protective cases, with RFIDs in them. We authenticate them with some of the best authenticators from around the United States. We grade them and then you can buy them at our channel retailers. And then, at a click of a button, it transfers over to the authority, and the authority is the world’s largest authenticated vaulted marketplace.”
If you’re not sure what an authenticated, vaulted marketplace is, Mullen said it means all the collectibles are pre-authenticated, pre-encapsulated, and they’re predefined and identified by Dynamics. This will address the issue of counterfeiting and fraud in the collectibles market, Mullen said.
While the company isn’t using any public blockchain technology, the authentication can be similar, as it is using private ledgers inside the company to do authentication, Mullen said.
All of the technologies combined with the expertise of the humans is how the company will be able to handle large volumes of collectibles across games and other industries, Mullen said. Consumers can submit the collectibles in volume to be graded, and the process of grading could cost perhaps 85 cents, compared to $40 or so in the market today.
“If you have a whole box of Pokemon cards, you could send them to us. You don’t need to tell us what they are. We will go through and identify them. We will authenticate them, we will encapsulate them, and then we will list them immediately on our marketplace,” Mullen said. “Then you can go in and price those items. And the other thing that we are doing is all of these collectibles are actually graded when they’re received.”
He added, “So they’re graded on a scale of 10. And then at any time, you can go in and you can purchase the grade. So by purchasing it, you’re just revealing the grade. And as a result, you can submit many more collectibles, and over time, as certain collectibles get more valuable, then you could make the determination that you want to grade it. And you can grade it instantly at the push of a button.”
If you want to ship the item, then Dynamics will apply an authentic Authority grading chip to the collectible. The firm will ultrasonically weld that to the case, and that can be done at scale.
“It’s how you grade millions and tens of millions, and then going on to hundreds of millions of collectibles. And so the infrastructure you need to build, is large. It is very deep,” Mullen said. “The Authority is this marketplace that you can submit things to. Everything’s pre-authenticated. You can buy and sell on it.”
The company will start out with trading card games (TCGs), figurines, comics and physical games. Mullen said that many grading companies have lost trust in recent years. In comics, there have been controversies around grading consistency, lack of transparency and more problems that have hurt the value of comics.
Expertise in collectibles
Mullen, who paid his way through college on the value of his video game collectibles, gathered expert graders and to them he wanted to build an open grading standard. They thought it was impossible.
“When I started it in 2007, Dynamics was funded through my collectibles,” Mullen said. “There are more people now collecting the old cases for games with the game discs in them. They love the physical stuff.”
And so he was determined to make this work. He hired the experts and trained them on a universal public grading standard. This open grading standard shows the experts how to grade. Mullen believes it can work in the collectibles industry as it does in the diamond and meat industries.
“What we are introducing is the first public open grading standard for each of these collectibles,” Mullen said. “You can validate by everything being vaulted. You can buy and sell without having to ship items to people. And so what that means is that if I’m collecting Sidney Crosby and I have a Sidney Crosby figure while Sydney is in the playoffs and he scores his first goal, I could sell it for a first price. When he scores his next goal, the next person could sell it, and you could have a collectible that’s transacted five times in a couple of minutes, because everything is vaulted.”
As for games, Mullen said that his company will go deep into video game grading for physical games.
“Any collectible and Upper Deck epack that has the authority logo can instantly be transferred into our marketplace. You just push a button, and then it appears in our marketplace,” Mullen said.
Platform benefits include:
- Dynamic Buy/Sell Marketplace — The Authority introduces the industry’s first multi-
item private offer system, allowing collectors to submit a single monetary offer for
multiple collectibles at once. Responding collectors can adjust the offer amount and/or
the items included, enabling seamless negotiation. Once finalized, ownership transfers
instantly between collector accounts.
- Real-Time Retailer Integration – Collectors can instantly transfer eligible collectibles from any channel retailer to TheAuthority.com. Items are immediately vaulted for secure storage and instant retail with no shipping or friction.
- Instant, Standardized Grading – Select items sold through channel retailers are ultrasonically encapsulated and pre-graded. After a collector transfers the item, buyers can instantly reveal the item’s grade. At fulfillment, the collectible’s encasement is permanently modified to include the item’s grade.
- The Authority Vault – Purchased items are indexed, tagged and securely held in anindustry-leading, secure vault. Items may be physically fulfilled from the vault at any time.
- Social Marketplace – Collectors can interact via private messaging and public forums.
- 0% Retailer Withdrawal Fee – Collectors can use proceeds from sales on The Authority to purchase from select, channel retailers with no withdrawal fee.
- Submit Any Item – Collectors can submit any type of item to be graded, tagged and vaulted. The Authority plans to introduce new encapsulation cases for additional collectible categories.
Starting today, collectors can instantly transfer select purchased collectibles from channel
retailers or physically mail collectibles to The Authority to utilize a variety of services.
Collectibles submitted to The Authority for authentication will be encapsulated in a variety of RFID-embedded cases. Each tag includes a unique identification number, a QR code, and a barcode to verify the collectible.
All the data for the transactions are stored in private ledgers.
Instead of using AI to grade cards now, Dynamics uses some of the best human experts in the world who can tell the difference between a real 1983 Super Mario cartridge and a fake one,” Mullen said. “They know all the little details like how many screws it has. When we say authentication, we’re using physical, manual people who are experts to authenticate.”
Those experts are helping the company earn trust in markets like video game certifications and similar markets.
Collectors can also encapsulate and authenticate trading cards for as low as $1.25, TCGS for as low as $1.25, comics for as low as $1.50, figurines for as low as $3.50, and memorabilia for as low as $10.00. Full pricing details can be found here.
Walking the journey with Dynamics
I’ve been writing about Dynamics since 2015. Every five years or so, Mullen and his team come up with a big product. And now the company has three business units – an electronics, security and safety, and collectible business unit. All built by 200 employees.
When I first met Mullen, he was pitching a clever way to embed chips in credit cards — something that is universal today. The company’s electronics division introduced market-defining electronics products such as the world’s first high-volume flexible consumer devices.
During the pandemic, the company’s security and safety division worked with NIAID biodefense to be the first group in the world to inactivate SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) using optical energy. It essentially used UV rays to zap germs.
Since 2012, Dynamics has also developed collectible platforms and technologies that have managed over 500 million collectibles. Dynamics operates multiple manufacturing facilities with its headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Now Mullen is making big waves again with a toehold in the games industry.
“This is a personal milestone for me to reach out to you again,” Mullen said.
Mullen knows that gamers love physical collectibles and yet they also want to know if the things they’re collecting are authentic.