The Infrastructure Layer
JK Index combines catalog identity, historical sales, portfolio tracking, marketplace rails, and Before the Slab settlement infrastructure.
Updated 2026-06-03
The visible product is search, cards, listings, portfolios, and Before the Slab events. Underneath that is the part that matters: identity, history, market state, order flow, inventory, and settlement logic.
JK Index already works with 63k+ cataloged cards and 5.5m+ backfilled historical sales records. Those numbers should remain easy to update because the platform keeps moving.
Card identity and catalog data
TCG markets break when identity is weak. Set, number, variant, language, printing, sealed versus single, and image context all affect whether a comp is useful.
The catalog layer gives the rest of the product a stable base. Search, pricing, portfolios, marketplace listings, API responses, and event creation all depend on card identity being clear enough to use.
Historical sales ingestion
Historical sales are the memory of the market. JK Index ingests and normalizes sales data so product surfaces can reason from more than one snapshot.
The goal is not to flatten every comp into one number. The goal is to preserve enough context that raw, graded, condition, and source differences can be respected over time.
Raw vs graded separation
Raw and graded separation is a product rule, not a marketing line. If the system cannot separate a signal honestly, the docs should say so and the UI should avoid pretending.
PSA-focused graded segments are the clearest current example. Future grader expansion depends on data quality, product coverage, and settlement confidence.
Portfolio tracking and marketplace rails
Portfolios turn market data into personal context. Marketplace rails turn context into action. Instant Listings and public listing surfaces are still beta-shaped, but they matter because intelligence without action becomes a dashboard people forget to use.
The marketplace should grow only as the rails prove they are ready: listing lifecycle, order state, fulfillment, dispute handling, payout logic, and seller trust all need to stay grounded.
Before the Slab trading engine
Before the Slab practice markets use a structured internal model: orders to reservations, reservations to inventory, inventory to closeout, projected positions to settlement.
That model lets the product represent market activity around an event before the final grading outcome exists. Real rails are future direction and require careful product, operational, and legal work before they can be represented as live.