What is a card birth certificate?

A Card Birth Certificate is a permanent record created the moment a card is pulled: its identity, its estimated value, the break it came from, the timestamp, and a scan-derived fingerprint of that specific card.

It is created on the spot, during the break, when the breaker lays a qualifying card on a flatbed scanner. The threshold is set by the breaker — commonly any card they judge to be worth more than a few hundred dollars. From that second forward the card carries provenance that survives sleeving, shipping, grading, cracking and resale years later, and the buyer can open the record by QR code.