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, American video games retailer GameStop revealed its intentions to launch an NFT Marketplace by the end of the second quarter of 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 Speeds Up The Launch Of Its NFT Marketplace
Last February 3, GameStop announced that the marketplace would be launched by the end of 2022; however, according to the new report, the launch date has been changed to late July of 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 specializing in games, blockchain, e-commerce, and various technology areas, so perhaps the marketplace could arrive 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 the move by Reddit users didn’t last long, it pushed the company’s stock price from $17 to a peak of about $482. Yes, the stock plummeted shortly after, but it is currently trading at $87 —which is still a significant rise, all things considered.
Price of GameStop stocks
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 marketplace may excite many users committed to the company’s success, the truth is that they will soon be facing the big names in the cryptocurrency industry such as Binance, FTX, OpenSea and a new renowned competitor such as Coinbase, so the competition is going to be tight for sure.