GemRate IDs

A GemRate ID is GemRate’s unique identifier for a card as cataloged by a single grading company. It’s the key you use across the API: it’s returned by cert and spec lookups, and it’s what GET /v1/cards/{gemrate_id} takes.

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One card, up to four IDs

Each grading company — PSA, Beckett, SGC, CGC — catalogs cards independently, so GemRate mints a separate ID per grader. A single real-world card therefore has up to four GemRate IDs, one for each grader’s entry. Each ID means “this card, graded by this grader.”

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The universal ID

When GemRate recognizes that several per-grader entries are the same card, it matches them together and promotes one of those IDs to be the universal GemRate ID — the single identifier that represents the card across every grader. A grader-scoped response carries both:

• gemrate_id — the grader-scoped ID for the entry you looked up.
• universal_gemrate_id — the promoted, cross-grader ID for the same card.

The universal ID is itself one of the card’s per-grader IDs (the promoted one). So for the promoted grader gemrate_id and universal_gemrate_id are identical, while the other graders’ gemrate_ids differ from it.

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Which field you get depends on the endpoint

The same value goes by different names depending on whether the endpoint is looking at a single grader’s copy or at the card as a whole:

• Grader-scoped lookups — e.g. GET /v1/certs/{grader}/{cert} — return both, because you’re looking at one grader’s copy of the card. Here gemrate_id is that grader’s entry and universal_gemrate_id is the matched cross-grader card, so the two can differ.
• Card-scoped endpoints — e.g. GET /v1/cards/{gemrate_id} (and specs / history) — deal with the card as a whole, so they expose a single gemrate_id field, and there that value is the universal ID. There’s no separate per-grader entry in view, so we don’t repeat it as universal_gemrate_id.

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Which one should I use?

• Use universal_gemrate_id for the cross-grader view — combined population across PSA, Beckett, SGC, and CGC, comparable on the universal grade scale. GET /v1/cards/{universal_gemrate_id} returns the merged card.
• Use a specific gemrate_id when you care about a single grader’s entry.

Both are accepted anywhere the API takes a {gemrate_id} path parameter.

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Example

A 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan #57 graded by all four companies: After matching, all four entries report universal_gemrate_id = abc123…, while each keeps its own grader-scoped gemrate_id.