Last year, the community revived GameStop from what seemed like a slow and painful death under the claws of greedy Wall Street hedge funds. Now, GameStop wants to give back and make the most out of this second chance with the launch of an NFT marketplace to serve gamers, crypto lovers and tech enthusiasts.
On March 17, US video game retailer GameStop revealed plans to launch an NFT marketplace by the end of Q2 2022.
According to its Q1report, the marketplace would be powered by Immutable X, a Layer 2 protocol running on the Ethereum network, allowing NFT to be exchanged instantly with a transaction scalability of 9,000 operations per second, without charging any fees to its users.
GameStop accelerates the launch of its NFT marketplace
On February 3, GameStop announced that the market would be launched by the end of 2022; however, according to the new report, the launch date has been moved to the end of July this year.
On the other hand, GameStop announced the creation of a $150 million fund in IMX tokens —the official cryptocurrency of Immutable X— that will be delivered to the company upon reaching specific goals. Part of that money will also be used to provide financial support to content creators and developers of the platform.
GameStop has already hired dozens of people who specialize in gaming, blockchain, e-commerce, and various tech fields, so maybe the market could come sooner than expected.
Innovating Once Again
Early last year, GameStop shares experienced exponential growth of more than 100% daily after several Reddit users joined forces to buy the company’s stocks in order to make Wall Street investors suffer. This endeavor ended up in what has been called the “mother of all short squeezes” on Reddit’s forums.
Although Reddit users’ decision didn’t last long, it took the company’s stock price from $17 to a high of around $482. Yes, the stock fell soon after, but it is currently trading at $87, which is still a significant increase, all things considered.
Thanks to that move, GameStop managed to recover from its multi-year slump, which brought its stock price down to $2.5. It also helped the company generate $2.254 billion again during the last fiscal quarter.
Although the news of a market may excite many users committed to the success of the company, the truth is that they will soon be faced with the big names in the cryptocurrency industry such as Binance, FTX, OpenSea and a new, big-name competitor such as Coinbase, so the competition is definitely going to be tough.
