Authentication turned a subjective object into a describable one. That is what made financial structure conceivable.
Before third-party grading, a transaction in this category required both parties to agree on condition, and condition was an opinion. That single ambiguity was enough to prevent anything resembling a financial market from forming, because you cannot build an instrument on an asset whose identity is contested.
Encapsulation as standardisation
Certification did something subtle. It did not make grading objective. Reasonable people still disagree, and standards drift. What it did was make the description portable. A certified asset can be discussed, compared and priced by people who have never held it, which is a precondition for any market with more than two participants.
The same pattern is now visible in watches, where serial numbers and service history support a functioning secondary market, and increasingly in handbags, where authentication infrastructure has matured considerably in a short period.
The constraint was never scarcity. Scarcity was always there. The constraint was describability.
Whether financial structure follows authentication in any particular category depends on more than describability alone. It also requires transaction depth, custody that participants trust, and a regulatory path that permits the structure. Cards satisfy the first two more completely than most alternatives, which is why they come first.