Guide · Redemption
Why redeeming a card burns the digital version
Yes — when you ship a card home, the digital version is destroyed. Courtyard states it plainly: keep the digital version and they keep custody of the physical card; take the physical card and they burn the digital one. Collector Crypt bundles the burn into the same signature you use to pay. You cannot have both, and that is not a platform being stingy. It is the only arrangement that can honestly work.
The token is a claim ticket, not a copy
It helps to stop thinking of the digital card as a picture of the card and start thinking of it as a coat-check ticket. The ticket is not the coat. It is a bearer claim on one specific coat hanging on one specific hook, and whoever holds the ticket can walk up and demand that coat.
Now imagine the cloakroom handed you the coat but let you keep the ticket. You could sell that ticket to someone else, who would arrive to claim a coat that is already in your wardrobe. One object, two valid claims. The cloakroom is now insolvent, and the person holding the ticket has bought nothing.
That is exactly what burning prevents. The number of tokens in existence has to equal the number of cards in the vault, permanently and verifiably. A card leaving the vault must be matched by a token leaving circulation. The burn is the mechanism that makes the whole model solvent — it is the thing that lets anyone check that every outstanding token is genuinely backed by a real slab sitting on a real shelf.
Why you are not allowed to burn it yourself
Courtyard blocks this explicitly: you cannot destroy the token by interacting with their contracts directly or by sending it to a null address. That restriction reads like a control grab until you work through what self-burning would actually do.
Destroying your own token outside the redemption flow would strand the card. The vault would still hold a physical slab, but the only claim on it would no longer exist — an orphaned asset nobody can retrieve, including you. Routing every burn through their process also lets them verify who they are shipping to, which is why redemption triggers identity checks, and lets them handle the tax that redemption creates. The restriction protects the person burning far more than it protects the platform.
What you are trading
Redemption is not an upgrade. It is a swap of one asset for a different asset with different properties, and it costs money to make.
What you gain
- The physical slab, in your hands, outside anyone else's custody.
- No more counterparty risk. Whatever happens to the platform afterwards — insolvency, a hack, a policy change — cannot reach a card that is already in your house.
- Freedom to sell anywhere: eBay, TCGplayer, a local shop, an auction house. You are no longer restricted to one platform's buyers or one platform's pricing.
What you give up
- It is irreversible. There is no re-listing the card on the platform afterwards, and no undo.
- You lose instant liquidity. Buyback and the platform marketplace are one click; selling a physical card means listing fees, shipping, buyer trust, and weeks of waiting.
- You pay to make the switch — shipping, and import tax where the platform charges it.
- Any digital-side utility goes with it: points, leaderboard position, and the ability to trade the card without moving it.
- If the platform's digital market prices the card above what physical comps say it is worth, burning locks that gap in as a loss.
No, it is not a tax manoeuvre
The burn exists for supply integrity, not for tax. But it does have tax consequences, and the two get confused because they happen at the same moment.
Redemption is the point where a digital asset becomes a physical good, and tax systems care a great deal about that transition. Courtyard charges US customers state sales tax by ZIP code at redemption — they state they collect it, remit it, and make nothing on it — and charges import tax to international buyers. In many jurisdictions, disposing of a digital asset in exchange for goods can also be a taxable disposal in its own right. So tax is a consequence of burning, never the purpose of it.
Nothing here is tax advice, and rules differ enormously by country and by how you personally hold these assets. Talk to someone qualified before assuming what you owe.
Why this is the number that matters to us
The burn is the moment a platform’s obligations end. Everything it advertises — insured storage, instant buyback, a liquid market, a pretty interface — applies to the digital layer only. Redemption is the exit from that layer, and it is the one part of the pitch that cannot be faked, because either the card arrives or it does not.
That also means the friction around redemption is worth watching closely. A platform that makes shipping expensive, slow, or vague is — whatever its intentions — keeping you inside the layer where it sets the price. That is not an accusation against any particular platform. It is the reason we pay to redeem cards ourselves and publish what it actually cost, rather than reading the help pages and taking their word for it.
Platform terms read 2026-08-03 · we update this page when they change