How to Verify a Graded Card

A graded card asserts two claims at once: that the card is what its label says it is, and that its condition is what the grade says it is. The market value of the slab rests entirely on whether those claims can be checked by someone who was not in the room when they were made. Historically, verification has meant trusting the slab itself — its label, its seal — because the record behind it was thin: a lookup that restated the label, with none of the evidence the grade was built from.

The CardFax™ Registry inverts that model. The record, not the slab, is the primary artifact: the slab carries the certificate; the registry proves it. Every grade issued under the Vision™ methodology is published into a permanent public record together with the evidence it was issued on, and every subsequent event in the card's life — audit, correction, transfer — appends to that record. Companion paper TC360-WP-2026-001 specifies how a grade is made; this paper specifies how it is verified.

Table 1 — Terminology used throughout this document.

3.1 One certificate, one record

Certification creates exactly one registry record per card, keyed by the certificate number printed on the slab label and encoded in its QR code. The record carries the card's identity, its grade and subgrades, the evidence imagery the grade was issued with, and the append-only history defined in §6–§8. The record is the product of grading; the slab is its physical carrier.

3.2 Permanence

Records do not expire, are not unpublished when a card is sold, and do not depend on any owner maintaining an account or a listing. The registry's storage discipline is append-only: entries are added, never edited in place or deleted. A correction does not replace the entry it corrects — it is recorded beside it, so the record always shows both what was originally stated and what was later established. A registry that can quietly rewrite its history cannot serve as proof of anything; permanence is the property every other guarantee in this paper rests on.

3.3 Public verifiability

Any record is retrievable by anyone holding the certificate number. Verification requires no account, no relationship with TradingCard360®, and no tooling beyond a browser. Scale at publication:

Table 2 — The CardFax™ Registry, scale as of August 2026.

Verification is a six-step procedure. Figure 1 summarizes the flow; each step is specified below.

Figure 1 — The six-step verification procedure. Each step compares the physical card against the registry record, never the reverse.

Two of these steps deserve emphasis. Step 2 is a hard gate: certificate numbers are issued only by certification, so a number the registry does not recognize was never issued, regardless of how convincing the slab looks. Step 3 is the defense against label substitution — the failure mode in which a genuine label is paired with a different card. The record describes one specific card; if the card in hand differs from that description in subject, set, year, or numbering, the certificate does not apply to it.

A grade without published evidence asks to be trusted; a grade with evidence asks to be checked. Every certificate publishes the evidence its grade was issued on: magnified imagery of each corner and edge region captured at grading time, full front and back identity imagery, and per-region findings stating what the examination observed. Where the physical measurement stage of the Vision™ methodology produced geometric findings (see TC360-WP-2026-001, §3.3), those findings accompany the imagery.

Evidence records serve verification in both directions. A prospective buyer compares the published magnifications against the card in hand and against the grade's stated reasoning. And because the evidence is fixed at issuance, it also protects the grade itself: a card damaged after certification no longer matches its evidence record, which is precisely what step 5 of the procedure is designed to surface.

A registry record can change after certification in exactly one way: through a documented audit. A disputed grade is re-examined under the same measured methodology it was issued under, and the outcome — confirmation or correction — is appended to the record with what changed, when, and why. The registry currently holds 4,100+ such append-only history entries across all certificates, spanning grade history, identity corrections, audits, and transfers.

Corrections are displayed, not hidden. A certificate whose grade was corrected shows the correction in its history alongside the original determination. This is a deliberate inversion of the industry default, in which a changed grade simply replaces its predecessor: a record that admits and displays its corrections is more trustworthy, not less, because its accuracy can be measured rather than asserted. Confirmed audit corrections also feed the methodology's governance loop as recorded precedent (TC360-WP-2026-001, §5.3).

Cards certified with physical memorabilia — relics, autographs, sealed artifacts — carry a claim that grading alone cannot cover: that the sealed item is the item the record describes. For these cards the registry maintains a chain-of-custody record anchored by a tamper-evident hologram applied at sealing. The hologram's serial is recorded on the certificate, and the record publishes provenance imagery of the sealed item and of the hologram itself.

Verification of a sealed-provenance card therefore adds one comparison to the §4 procedure: the physical hologram serial must match the serial the record states. The custody timeline documents the card's handling as discrete recorded events — intake, sealing, certification — each carrying its date and documentation. Breaking the seal breaks the chain: a re-sealed card requires re-examination and a new custody record, and the registry's append-only discipline preserves the original chain beside it.

The registry records ownership. A card's registered owner is set at certification, and subsequent changes of ownership are executed as transfers that append to the record's history. The certificate's identity, grade, evidence, and history are unaffected by transfer — the record follows the card, not the owner. Grading attribution is likewise permanent: the record of who submitted a card for grading is written once at certification and does not change with subsequent ownership.

For verification, transfer history answers the provenance question evidence records cannot: not just what the card is, but where it has been. A card offered for sale by a party with no relationship to its transfer history is not necessarily illegitimate — transfers outside the registry are possible (§9) — but the history gives the buyer a documented baseline to ask questions against.

• The record certifies the card as sealed at certification. A slab that has been opened is outside the record's guarantee until the card is re-examined; the evidence record (§5) is the instrument for detecting post-certification change.
• Public listing and retrievability are distinct. Owners control whether a card appears in public feeds; certificates of unlisted cards remain fully retrievable by certificate number. Absence from a feed is not absence from the registry.
• Transfers outside the registry are invisible to it. A private sale that is never claimed as a transfer leaves the registered owner unchanged. The certificate remains valid; only the ownership entry lags until the new owner records the claim.
• Future work. Planned extensions include expanded measured-evidence publication at grade time, registry-wide population reporting, and companion methodology papers for centering, edges, and surface. Revisions will appear in the revision history below.

1. "How to Grade Card Corners: The Vision™ Methodology." White paper TC360-WP-2026-001, TradingCard360® Research, 2026. tradingcard360.com/how-to-grade-card-corners
2. The CardFax™ Registry — the public verification registry this paper specifies. tradingcard360.com/card-fax-registry
3. "AI Card Grading: How It Works." TradingCard360® Research, 2026. tradingcard360.com/ai-card-grading
4. TradingCard360® Grading Standards — the published grade scale and subgrade formulas. tradingcard360.com/card-grading-software
5. The graded card feed — every certificate issued under this methodology. tradingcard360.com/graded-cards

Revision history.