DUBAI – Yesterday, onstage at the global celebration of popular culture known as PopCon ME, Speedy Comics ME and AGS announced their new joint venture, AGSpeedy Technologies. AGSpeedy Technologies uses AI to authenticate memorabilia, which will then be verified immutably on Sui, the layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform. 

AGSpeedy Technologies is the brainchild of AGS, an AI-based card grading system that provides authentication and grading services for physical collectibles, from sports trading cards to trading card games like Pokemon and Magic The Gathering, and Speedy Comics ME, the Middle East’s leading destination for vintage comics and collectibles. Parent company AGS is responsible for grading nearly one hundred thousand cards in 2023, while its AI database covers millions more. 

Collectibles have always had a tight grasp on the imagination of consumers – from stamps to the trading card games of the 90s and beyond, consumers love to collect, trade, and own. In the NFT boom of 2021 and 2022, the world saw collectibles take a digital form that easily allowed anyone to track the provenance and ownership of the digital asset, as well as showcasing the potential of digital assets based on NFT technology. However, given the newness of the technology, traditional collectors found it hard to navigate and often found the digital collectible experience unwieldy, expensive, and prone to scams.  

As a result of this partnership, AGSpeedy's system scans physical collectibles and uses its AI engine to verify and grade the item, generating an authenticity certificate which includes the item's grade and uploads it to Sui. The certificate serves as an immutable digital twin of the collectible item, which is tradable or sellable, and any change in ownership will be recorded. Thanks to Sui’s native feature zkLogin, any user can create an account on Sui with credentials from Google, Slack, Twitch and more, abstracting away from the need for private key management.  

“One of the biggest roadblocks to digital collectibles has been onboarding users to web3,” said Alex Aleksandrovski, co-founder of AGSpeedy Technologies. “The process is difficult and confusing to the average person. Because it is so easy to create a web3 wallet using a web2 login on Sui, Sui is finally presenting the solution. AGSpeedy’s goal is to allow collectors to digitize their physical cards and collectibles and we are confident that Sui is the best partner to make that happen.” 

“Through this collaboration, AGSpeedy is set to transform the collectibles industry by enhancing market confidence and liquidity,” said Rashed Mohammed Zubair Al Farooq, CEO of Speedy Comics Group and CEO of Pop Con ME. “Recording gradings on Sui provides a tamper-proof, immutable record of an item's quality and condition, increasing trust among buyers and sellers. This heightened confidence is expected to boost market activity, making it easier for collectors to trade and liquidate assets with peace of mind in a trusted and safe secondary marketplace. This technology is completely unique to this region, and this is just the beginning.”

“Collectible authentication is the perfect use case for blockchain technology,” said Evan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs and Original Contributor to Sui. “The combination of AI-powered grading and blockchain-based verification for collectors in the MENA region has the potential to reduce fraud while also introducing fans around the world to web3-powered technology, which is what we set out to accomplish with Sui – creating real world solutions for real world problems.” 

About Sui 

Sui is a first-of-its-kind Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform designed from the bottom up to make digital asset ownership fast, private, secure, and accessible to everyone. Its object-centric model, based on the Move programming language, enables parallel execution, sub-second finality, and rich on-chain assets. With horizontally scalable processing and storage, Sui supports a wide range of applications with unrivaled speed at low cost. Sui is a step-function advancement in blockchain and a platform on which creators and developers can build amazing, user-friendly experiences. Learn more: https://sui.io.

About Speedy Group 

Speedy Group has created a phenomenon in pop culture for the very first time in the Gulf. The Speedy Group was created in 2018 and is one of the biggest toys and vintage pop culture groups in the G.C.C. with rights to brands such as Geek House Show, Vaulted Vinyl, Undone, Super Hero Planet, Qposket and Q8 Toys. Speedy Group is the owner of Speedy Comics ME, the region’s leading destination for vintage comics and pop culture collectibles. 

About AGS 

AGS is the first company to fully grade and authenticate cards with artificial intelligence, giving our customers full transparency, and consistency to the market. Our team has built a patent-pending scanning system that provides valuable data about the card being graded. Our software analyzes the data to give the most accurate grade. Using our scalable technology, AGS is ready to become the standard of grading for the collectibles industry. Learn more: https://agscard.com/