In Brief:
- Moonbirds said its Birbs Beyond sale opens Friday at 11 a.m. EST on Panini America Blockchain.
- The drop lands mid-run at the National Sports Collectors Convention, where Panini is handing out a special edition “Striker Birb” Vibes TCG card paired with a digital redemption.
- It puts an NFT-native IP on a platform that has processed more than $166 million in lifetime sales and just posted two straight $10 million-plus months in secondary volume.
Moonbirds is selling its Birbs Beyond collection on Panini America Blockchain beginning Friday at 11 a.m. EST, the project said.
Panini has not published pricing or edition sizes. The sale runs on Panini’s own platform rather than Ethereum or Solana, where Moonbirds and its BIRB token respectively live.
birb meets Panini, the world’s largest sports and entertainment collectibles company.
The Birbs Beyond sale goes live Friday at 11:00AM EST on @PaniniAmerica Blockchain.@MoonbirdsView on X ↗
The timing is deliberate. Panini Blockchain is the featured attraction at the company’s booth at the National Sports Collectors Convention, which runs Wednesday through Sunday at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center outside Chicago.
What’s on the floor
Panini brought back its Blockchain Briefcases for the show, three of them this year after debuting a single unit in 2025. Each is a 27-inch touchscreen preloaded with special edition digital packs. Attendees enter their Panini Blockchain ID, rip a pack on the show floor and get the contents delivered to their account.
Two free digital packs per Blockchain ID is the cap. Accounts have to be registered through nft.paniniamerica.net or the Panini Direct app.
Panini partnered with Orange Cap Games, which owns Moonbirds, on a separate giveaway at booth 661: an envelope holding a physical “Striker Birb” Vibes TCG card plus a redemption card for the digital version. Panini said supplies won’t last.
Panini’s numbers
The platform launched in late 2019 on Hyperledger Sawtooth and has moved more than $166 million across over 65,000 unique buyers. Its record month was September 2025 at $15,634,447 spent over roughly 341,000 transactions, more than double the prior high of just over $7 million set in August.
In March, Panini opened an Ethereum bridge that lets collectors pull cards out of Panini wallets and into self-custody, where they can trade on OpenSea. The original Panini card locks in escrow so only one version of the asset can move at a time.
“A natural evolution for the category,” OpenSea head of partnerships Oliver Maroney said of officially licensed cards going onchain.
The volume is arriving as Panini’s sports licenses thin out. Its NBA rights transferred to Fanatics in October 2025 and its NFL license expired March 31. The 50-year FIFA deal it renewed in December 2023 covers the 2026 and 2030 World Cups.
Orange Cap’s year
Orange Cap Games bought Moonbirds, Mythics and Oddities from Yuga Labs in a deal finalized May 30, 2025, Yuga’s third IP sale that year after CryptoPunks and Meebits. The Moonbirds floor went from 0.295 ETH to 0.9 ETH on the news, with weekly volume topping $2 million, up 2,525%.
The studio then raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by 1kx and Yuga Labs, with Bing Ventures, Infinity Ventures Crypto and angels participating. That followed a $2 million pre-seed backed by Igloo Inc., Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon and Rektguy creator OSF.
Vibes, the studio’s trading card game, runs on Abstract and started with Pudgy Penguins (official site). It has sold more than four million cards, hosted over 350,000 online matches and reached more than 100 retailers. PSA and CGC both grade it, and it became the 19th most-graded TCG at CGC.
The two IPs merged in the game’s third and largest expansion, “Birb & Pengu,” which added 195 cards starting June 18 along with Birb Foil and Fish Foil finishes. The Striker Birb card being handed out in Chicago carries a 2026 World Cup ball.
BIRB launched on Solana on Jan. 28 with a fixed supply of one billion tokens at a $200 million fully diluted valuation. It traded around $0.13 in May.
Founder and CEO Spencer Gordon-Sand has described what he’s building as the “Pop Mart” of the Web3 world.
