Interesting lesson here. @CandyDigital goes down = “wrong product.” Top Shot disappoints = “wrong platform.” @PaniniAmerica goes up = “I finally figured it out.” Convenient. 😂 Maybe. Or maybe the thesis keeps changing to match whichever bag is performing best at the moment. If Panini drops 70% someday while Candy or Top Shot takes off, does the definition of the “right product” change again? There’s a difference between collecting conviction and market conviction. And I keep coming back to one genuine question: What exactly makes Panini a fundamentally better DIGITAL collectible than Candy, other than Panini already having decades of prestige in physical cards? Candy has official MLB licensing. Ohtani actually wears his Dodgers uniform. No red and white pajama Ohtani. You have officially licensed MLB moments with video and sound, digital-native designs, real scarcity, jerseys, milestone baseballs and collectibles created specifically for the digital medium. Then there’s ownership. Candy has moved its collectibles toward real self-custody on Solana. Panini deserves credit for launching an Ethereum bridge, but the Ohtani and Wembanyama sports collectibles we’re discussing still have not been enabled for Ethereum self-custody. So if you believe blockchain matters… If you believe digital ownership matters… If you believe self-custody matters… If you believe officially licensed digital collectibles have a future… Why exactly was collecting Candy Ohtani a “mistake”? Because the price is down today? As a collector, if I genuinely love what I own, understand why it matters, and believe its scarcity, provenance, chronology and historical significance could matter much more 5 or 10 years from now, that conviction means more to me than chasing whichever platform happens to have a handful of six-figure sales today. Of course I care about value. But if yesterday’s historically significant collectibles suddenly become “mistakes” because another platform has better price action today, then price isn’t merely part of the thesis. Price IS the thesis. And this is where the constant FUD becomes interesting to me. One post criticizing Candy? Fair. A few posts expressing frustration about Top Shot? Fair. But when someone is heavily invested in Panini and keeps throwing shade at Candy and Top Shot over and over again, I start reading it differently. My view? It looks like frustration mixed with fear. Frustration over what happened to the previous bags. And maybe some fear that after putting serious money into Panini, the exact same cycle could happen again. What if Panini cools off? What if Candy succeeds? What if Top Shot comes back? What if some of the collectibles being called “mistakes” today eventually become important artifacts from the early history of digital sports collecting? I obviously can’t know what someone else is thinking. But from the outside, constantly attacking competing collections while being heavily financially exposed to one platform can start looking less like objective analysis and more like needing the current bet to be right. And you really don’t need to throw shade at other people’s collections to make Panini look good. If Panini is truly that strong, let the collectibles prove it. Candy succeeding doesn’t mean Panini loses. Top Shot recovering doesn’t make your Panini collection less important. Multiple platforms can succeed. That’s actually what I want for digital collecting. Panini could become dominant. Candy could become huge. Top Shot could have another cycle. Nobody knows. But a hot market in 2026 does not erase digital chronology, provenance, scarcity or historical importance. Markets rotate. History doesn’t.