FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (September, 2026)
In early 1994, months after Joe Carter’s World Series-winning home run electrified Toronto, Richard Budman stood beside Carter at his first autograph signing following the moment — a young collectibles dealer capturing a piece of history as it was still being written.
Exactly thirty years later, Budman made a decision: it was time to give collectibles like that one a permanent home on the blockchain. In 2024, he arranged to meet Carter again — this time with intent. New “Home Run” pieces were signed, and unlike anything from three decades earlier, they were tokenized from the start. Budman even recreated the original 1994 photo with Carter, three decades apart, holding a framed print of the moment that started it all.
That meeting marked a beginning for CollectorLINK — Budman’s project to give physical memorabilia a permanent, verifiable on-chain record. It wasn’t a bet on hype or speculation; it was the answer to a question thirty years in the business had made unavoidable: how do you make sure a piece’s story — who signed it, when, and why it mattered — never gets lost, forged, or left behind as ownership changes hands?
At its core, tokenization means attaching a permanent, on-chain record to a physical collectible — its authentication, its provenance, its ownership history — so that record travels with the piece forever, instead of living on a sticker that can be lost, a certificate that can be photocopied, or a claim that has to be re-proven every time the piece changes hands. The industry has watched authentication scandals erode collector trust for years; CollectorLINK’s answer is what Budman has come to call “authenticating the authentication” — not replacing the dealers and experts who authenticate a piece in the first place, but making sure that authentication can never be quietly forged, revoked, or lost to time.
Budman’s idea is a quiet but important correction to how the last blockchain wave treated collectibles. The NFT boom asked people to believe the token itself was the valuable thing — a digital object to be bought, flipped, and speculated on. CollectorLINK starts from the opposite premise: the token was never meant to be the collectible. It was always meant to be a wrapper around one — a permanent shell of authentication, provenance, and liquidity built around a real, physical object that already had value long before blockchain existed.
The Joe Carter signed photograph doesn’t matter because it’s tokenized. It’s tokenized because it already mattered, and now that mattering can’t be lost on the blockchain.
In the time since, CollectorLINK has grown into active use with early collectors and dealers, onboarding a small number of founding partners who’ve spent careers building trust the old way — and are ready to see that trust travel forward, permanently, the way Budman’s own relationship with Carter’s World Series winning home run already has.
CollectorLINK is a project of North Collectors Co., based in Toronto.
KEY LINKS:
collectorlink.net
collectorlink.xyz
collectorlink.xyz/dealers
