The video game retailing brand GameStop is in the process of making a team of a non-fungible token or NFT platform, which is based on Ethereum. A rarely populated page on the website reported that the organization is now welcoming exceptional designers, engineers, gamers, community leaders, and marketers for joining the team and including a link to one Ethereum address. This address will show that as one part of the platform’s plan, GME has made an ERC-721 standardized token that is utilized for creating NFTs.
While any details for the planned platform are actually quite far in short-term supply, a graphic that encouraged creators, players, and collectors might suggest that the Non-fungible tokens will be based on the process of gaming.
GameStop with Reddit Traders
Most of all, GameStop, whose actual fame got skyrocketed in the early months of 2021 as Reddit traders massively shorted the stock, was giving some clues on its interest in the block chain industry. This was especially true for NFTs. In the month of April, the retailer for a video game was looking for an analyst for security coming with experience in that matter. As of the press time, the organization has not quite issued an official statement regarding its NFT project or any further details on the topic; however, considering that it will be based on the cryptocurrency of Ethereum, the collectibles might be able to adopt the ERC-721 standard.
GameStop was at the pivotal point of a trading market that got driven through the WalllStreetBets Reddit forum in January. It saw the stock of the organization going soar high at $483 on January 27 as compared to the $18 by the end of the year 2020. The stock has also experienced a small yet considerable rally in the current times, priced at $217.99 in the pre-market trading – which is an increase of about 23 percent since the start of May.
Increasing Popularity of NFTs and GameStop
Although the popularity of the NFT has been increasing over the span of a few months, the pace has considerably slowed together through the bull run of the cryptocurrency. According to research from the Non-fungible tokens, the actual number of daily sales running from April 27 and May 26 got down from 34,000 to 20,236 non-fungible tokens. What’s more, the value for the daily sales got dropped to $15.1 million on May 26 from a considerably high hit on May 9 at the price of $176 million.
On the other side, the saga for the GameStop with the short squeeze seen in the month of January keeps coming in the news. In the month of February, Vlad Tenev, who is the CEO of Robinhood, denied any speculations around him that he was under pressure from hedge funds to freeze any trade in the stocks like the video game retailer.
The GameStop performance in today’s stock market has considerably been positive, which trades to $242.32 and then currently up to 15.70 percent soon after the opening the day at $228.47.
The organization was founded by the alumni of Harvard 37 years ago, and retail investors got banded together for buying its stock and beating the Wall Street hedge funding at this game. The shares of the company got raised to as high as 2,500 percent in only a few weeks, with a lot of herd mentality that got sparked up on the forum followed by the popularity of the trading applications such as Robinhood.
It actually made a lot of changes in the leadership at the activist direction of investor Ryan Cohen. He is leading the shift to e-commerce to compete with the big retailers. The Chief Customer Officer named Frank Hamlin and the Chief Financial Officer named Jim Bell were some of the senior executives who left in 2021, and the Chief Executive Officer George Sherman will be leaving on July 31 or on the appointment of his successor. Matt Francis, who was the former Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineering lead, was appointed to be the chief technology officer in the month of February.
Final Word
Cohen and two other board members aim to convert GameStop into the new Amazon for gaming. However, the organization’s transfer to NFTs, or the Non-Fungible Token, arrives at a highly interesting point in time. Even though this cryptocurrency has become quite popular in the digital world, the actual value of daily sales has gotten slumped by $160 million in a single month.
