# What We Are: A Card Trading Platform Market.Cards is a platform for "investing in people" — the players you love, and a scarce card that represents them. At its core, Market.Cards is a card trading platform. We chose cards as our starting category because, among all the scarcity categories built around people, cards are one of the few that simultaneously carry a **standardized format, a defined issuance system, and an established pricing system**. A card distills the scarcity, the story, and the market attention that gather around an individual — a Character — into something that can be held, priced, and traded. That Character can be a sports star, or just as easily an anime or manga character. We chose the **FIFA World Cup and football** as our starting point for two reasons: * Top-tier football player cards are currently priced structurally below top-tier basketball cards (about 1/3 to 1/4 of the latter) — we chose to enter through a category with a relatively lower entry price point, which is friendlier to early users; * Beyond the World Cup, football is supported year-round by the top European leagues, so player performance windows are almost continuous. Starting from the World Cup, we will gradually expand into other sports, as well as anime / manga, TCG (Trading Card Games), and other card categories built around Characters. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.market.cards/welcome-to-market.cards/what-we-are-a-card-trading-platform.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.