GameStop Announces Partnership With FTX And Aims To Sell Gift Cards

Twitter icon  •  Published 1年前  •  Nikolas Sargeant

GameStop Corp. shared a brief increase after the video game retailer announced that it had inked a partnership with the major cryptocurrency exchange FTX US

GameStop Corp. shared a brief increase after the video game retailer announced that it had inked a partnership with the major cryptocurrency exchange FTX US. The collaboration suggests that the former videogame company is continuing to push forward with its long-term plan of shifting into the crypto space, with the development of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), even after reporting losses in sales.

GameStop’s CEO Ryan Cohen has pioneered the company’s push into crypto. However, the market has been skeptical of his ambitions to turn the gaming company into something entirely different. 

GameStop And FTX US

Cohen believes that the NFT market will benefit significantly from targeting gamers, which ties in with GameStop’s leading community. The plan is that partnering with FTX US will help the gaming firm push new e-commerce and online marketing initiatives and offer FTX gift cards in selected stores.

The partnership has been made public, but the financial details are yet to be revealed. GameStop shares are down 35% this year, so there is a lot of hope about the FTX deal. 

The deal isn’t GameStop’s first foray into NFTs; it launched a digital asset wallet in June this year. The wallet is fully equipped to allow games to send and receive cryptocurrencies and NFTs. The following month, in July, the company rolled out an NFT marketplace to trade digital assets.

The declining market has not worked favorably for GameStop, with net sales down 4% to $1.14 billion in the fiscal second quarter, falling short of analysts' estimates. The company has made a net loss of $108.7 million.

Mutual Interest In Robinhood

The partnership with GameStop had brought together two companies with a mutual interest in Robinhood Markets Inc., which offers a free trading app that investors made famous when they priced up GameStop shares back in 2021. The CEO and founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, took a 7.6% stake in Robinhood earlier this year.

FTX US recently expanded its trading service beyond crypto, offering access to non-crypto assets. The company has been very forward-thinking this year, pushing its reach to a more global market and expanding its services into other sectors, including partnering with Reddit to enable crypto payments to users.

GameStop has also aimed to expand its retail strategy, focusing on toys and collectibles at its stores. This has been fruitful for the company, with sales reaching $223.2 million in the quarter, up from $177.2 million in the same quarter the previous year.

Author

Nikolas Sargeant

Nik is a content and public relations specialist with an ever-growing interest in Crypto. He has been published on several leading Crypto and blockchain based news sites. He is currently based in Spain, but hails from the Pacific Northwest in the US.