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GameStop NFT Marketplace Rumors Swirl — What It Means for the Future of the Meme Stock

GameStop NFT Marketplace Rumors Swirl — What It Means for the Future of the Meme Stock

GameStop is going meta. The company, which reached a somewhat cult status among the Reddit army with its meme stock, has posted a slew of NFT-platform and Web3 gaming jobs on its career page this week, and rumors are flying as to what and when the company will launch.

The company also has a barebone website dedicated to an NFT platform, which says “We welcome exceptional engineers (solidity, react, python), designers, gamers, marketers, and community leaders. If you want to join our team, send your profile or something you’ve built to: nfteam@gamestop.com.”

“Just like we saw with Amazon hiring for crypto and blockchain specialists earlier this year, we’re seeing more and more companies looking to integrate crypto and blockchain into their roadmaps,” Stephen Stonberg, CEO of Bittrex Global, told GOBankingRates. “The future includes crypto as well as its underlying technology blockchain — which has proven to be a catalyst of innovation in so many sectors outside of its well-known home base. Blockchain is really the key to a metaverse-esque future for gaming, retail, the medical sector, and other industries. It’s exciting to see frontrunners in each market category push for the integration of blockchain within their respective sector.”

The job postings include three director of marketing- NFT platform positions; three senior software engineers- NFT platform positions; and two product owner- Head of Web3 gaming positions.

Tobias Batton, Founder and CEO at Ex Populus, an entertainment brand and publishing platform built entirely on Ethereum, told GOBankingRates that “GameStop holds a very special place in the heart of the game and investment community and it’s encouraging to see the company leverage its resources to create an innovative new platform that drives the industry forward.”

Batton added that it is inevitable that smart contracts will become ubiquitous and commonplace in the commerce of games and even within the games themselves. NFTs in video games are the likely species of blockchain technology to lead the way in the mass adoption of crypto and its various appendages.

“We are cheering for GameStop and are eager to meet them in the arena as a competitor,” Batton said.

Anndy Lian, Chairman, BigONE Exchange and founding member of NFT studio and marketplace INFLUXO, echoes the sentiment, telling GOBankingRates that “it is good to see another mainstream listed company heading into the crypto space.”

“Many of my friends think that this is a bullish sign for investors. I also see Redditors are claiming that they will buy more GME Shares when the marketplace happens. There will be an overflow to the crypto markets, too. From our exchange’s perspective, we have received more inquiries about listing of NFT Marketplaces in the last 24 hours, Lian added. “With the added publicity, I believe more companies will ride on the waves and take this as a chance. This would also mean that we will see more blockchain and crypto adoption through storefront locations, for example. Web 3.0 marketplace will be greater when more people are talking and using it.”

GameStop started getting in the news last January, when retail traders on the subreddit group WallStreetBets, who were intent on taking down hedge-fund short sellers by buying shares of stocks that didn’t seem to have much of a chance of success, sent stocks, including GameStop, soaring (and then crashing). This led to a slew of events, including a record 400% weekly gain for the week ending Jan. 29, which triggered intense regulatory scrutiny. Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released its much-anticipated report on the GameStop frenzy, “the most famous meme stock, which raised questions about market structure and investor protections at the beginning of the year.”

 

Original Source: https://www.gobankingrates.com/investing/crypto/gamestop-nft-marketplace-rumors-swirl-what-it-means-for-future-meme-stock/

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
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Anndy Lian Speaks at American Digital Week: ‘Decentralized Finance – What are the Opportunities?’

Anndy Lian Speaks at American Digital Week: ‘Decentralized Finance – What are the Opportunities?’

Anndy Lian, Chairman of BigONE Exchange gave a speech at the American Digital Week event on 19 October 2021, 13:00 – GMT. His topic is about ‘Decentralized Finance – What are the Opportunities?’

The following is the summary of his speech.

This is a fantastic time to be in DeFi, driven by short and long term drivers from the explosive growth of the NFT market overtaking DeFi, the new breed of play-to-earn games or GameFi, to rise of the ‘metaverse’ as the next big thing, there’s also a lot to unpick which is exciting an a little daunting if you are new to it.

But let’s start with some basics for those of you new to DeFi. A decentralized finance (DeFi) system allows people to create financial products or “smart contracts” that execute actions automatically on the blockchain – without any bank, brokerage, exchange, or corporation acting as an intermediary.

At the end of July 2021, the market capital for DeFi products was hovering near $80 billion. While that was down from its May peak of more than $89 billion, pundits believe growth will continue in the coming year as DeFi projects mature. Key to that maturity process is innovation DeFi – creating opportunities to profitably shape a decentralized future you’ll be sure to want to be a part of.

Let’s start with non-fungible tokens or more commonly known as NFTs. The NFT industry has exploded in popularity this year. There was more than $2.5 billion in sales volume during the first half of 2021 and it has only accelerated since then. OpenSea, the most popular NFT marketplace, saw more than $3 billion in NFT sales volume just during the month of August.

So what’s driving this demand in NFTs? The fact is that digital natives would rather own digital goods than physical goods, which means that we are watching the digitization of the collectibles industry. These digital natives want to use the NFTs as a way to play games, transact with each other, and generally recreate the collectibles industry. Another perspective, as outlined recently by popular crypto podcaster Pomp, is that we are watching the birth of a new type of status:

“Each individual that would normally drop $50,000 to $1,000,000 to purchase a car, watch, house, boat, etc is now realizing that you can spend the same money on a digital good and flex in front of more people on the internet. Only so many friends can check out your house and be impressed. But millions of people a month will see your Twitter avatar. These NFTs are a great example of where I would expect billions, if not trillions, of dollars to be made in the coming years.”

As Pomp says, just as every business had to figure out an internet strategy in the 1990s, every business is going to have to figure out their bitcoin strategy and every business is going to have to figure out their NFT strategy as well.

Speaking at the recent Paris ETH event EthCC Ben Lakoff, co-founder of NFT-protocol Charged Particles highlighted NFTs as in-game items and in the metaverse as examples: “There’s actually a new publicly traded exchange-traded fund, META. In your brokerage account, you can now get exposure to the metaverse plays that are publicly traded.”

Talking of the metaverse just a few weeks ago Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said within five years Facebook would be a “metaverse company” while Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, said they were investing in the “enterprise metaverse.” Simply put, whoever can integrate NFTs and payment with the metaverse may well lead the biggest change in online culture and economy since the birth of the web in the 1990s. A view supported by David Raszucki, head of the $50 billion Roblox Corporation, who sees the emergence of the metaverse as profound a shift as the invention of the internet and the world wide web.

In a close fit with the vision of an open metaverse, play to earn crypto games are built on the fundamental need for a place that is available to everyone and owned by no one in particular. An amalgam of gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi), ‘GameFi’ refers to the intersection between blockchain-based gaming and decentralized financial instruments in all their guises: yield farming, lending/borrowing, algorithmic stablecoins, token minting instruments, etc.

“Crypto has been looking for a mass market use case,” Andrew Tu, an executive at quantitative trading firm Efficient Frontier, told CoinDesk. “Gaming is a sector that people have been hyping up for a long time. It’s the first area of crypto where the average Joe without a huge understanding of crypto or blockchain can participate.”
This rise in popularity of GameFi and associated tokens has captured the attention of the wider crypto market, especially in the longer-term trend of NFTs and the metaverse. The fund’s goal is to support developers and create GameFi projects by building decentralized finance (DeFi) content, the foundation said in a press release.

“GameFi is going to be the next big thing that makes the DeFi, NFT and the larger crypto space easy to understand and be involved in,” said Sun.

A striking example of how the rise of GameFi is driving the value of tokens came in early August with Axie Infinity, the popular crypto gaming platform on Ethereum, which raked in more than $220 million in revenue in 30 days to early August, making it the top revenue generator among all DeFi protocols and blockchains, Ethereum included, according to data from Token Terminal.

Not surprisingly this phenomenal price growth has caught traders and crypto market watchers’ attention. News BTC said, “Axie Infinity has been on an absolute tear lately. The play-to-earn platform has become the face of a new integration of crypto and gaming that holds unbelievable potential. Axie Infinity has surpassed 1M daily active users and is generating more revenue than any protocol or platform with the lone exception of Ethereum. Yes, Axie Infinity is yielding more fee revenue than major platforms such as OpenSea, Uniswap, Bitcoin, or the Binance Smart Chain.”

One of the key problems associated with such rapid growth in the DeFi ecosystem is the increasing transaction costs, particularly the rapidly increasing Ethereum gas fees. To address this issue, many projects in the crypto space are starting to offer cross-chain functionality. One of the most successful innovators in this space has been Polkadot. The price of the Polkadot governance coin (DOT) has risen to over $30 from under $10 in August. This puts DOT’s market cap at over $30 billion, about the same size as Ethereum a year ago. Also worth noting is the rise of Solana, recently listed on BigOne exchange, another ‘Ethereum-killer’ with lightning fast transactions at a fraction of the price. The rapid increase in value is largely a result of crypto gaming and successful NFT launches. Amid a huge NFTs sales, resulted in a bull rally of the Solana and the price of its token SOL which, trading at $1.60 during the start of January, smashed its all-time high (ATH) $194.82 on September 7th, 2021.

The full video can be obtained at:

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j

What’s the importance of cryptocurrency payments going mainstream?

What’s the importance of cryptocurrency payments going mainstream?

A sign of the growing mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrency came recently with the announcement that US-based cinema chain AMC will soon be accepting cryptocurrency payments. It comes just a few months after PayPal decided to allow US consumers to use crypto to make purchases, and news that Mastercard would be supporting cryptocurrency payments across its network. The question is though, while use of crypto for financial transactions may makes sense, is buying your movie tickets and popcorn with Bitcoin worth the bother?

In August, AMC announced that it would for the first time accept Bitcoin as payment. This was followed by news that moviegoers could also pay for tickets online with Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. AMC’s CEO Adam Aron tweeted: “Cryptocurrency enthusiasts: you likely know @AMCTheatres has announced we will accept Bitcoin for online ticket and concession payments by year-end 2021. I can confirm today that when we do so, we also expect that we similarly will accept Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.” One unexpected reaction to the news came from the Dogecoin community on Twitter, who see the meme coin as a more natural crypto payment coin.

Top DogeCoin YouTuber @Mark Wallace tweeted in reply to Aron: “You could have effortlessly had millions of new supporters by accepting #Dogecoin. No reason not to when you literally accept Litecoin which is also based off BTC. Selling all my AMC stock to buy more $Doge. Ridiculous.” The strength of reaction is perhaps not surprising considering that Shark Tank star and billionaire owner of the NBA team Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, told US-broadcaster CNBC recently that not only is Dogecoin “a medium that can be used for the acquisition of goods and services,” but that also “the community for doge is the strongest when it comes to using it as a medium of exchange”.

Certainly, BigONE believes that mainstream cryptocurrency adoption is a key driver in the price of digital currencies earlier this year. This belief is supported by global finance executives polled by ‘Big Four’ auditors Deloitte. In Deloitte’s 2021 Global Blockchain Survey, 81% of the financial services executives believe that blockchain technology is “broadly scalable” and has achieved mainstream adoption. In the retail sector, Walmart and Amazon’s crypto recruitment announcements have raised awareness that these retail behemoths may be planning to open their doors to cryptocurrencies. It maybe a little ambitious to believe the giant online retailer Amazon will go as far as implementing Dogecoin for payment purposes, but that hasn’t stopped a petition titled ‘Doge4Amazon’ from picking up strong community support in 2021. Started three years ago with 20k supporters, in a sign if then times in the last 6 months its jumped from 75k, to 100k, and now to close to 250K signatures. Consumers can already use cryptocurrency to pay at other retailers such as Overstock, Best Buy, and Starbucks via third-party apps.

What’s the importance of cryptocurrency payments?

When Bitcoin was first introduced in January 2009, it promised to be the world’s first digital currency that did not require the support of a bank or government, its supporters claiming it promised a decentralized payment method that would change the world’s economic structure. With the emergence of more and more cryptocurrencies, the total market value has surpassed $2 trillion. Although blockchain technology is transforming many industries, cryptocurrency has yet to reach its full potential as a payment method.

One of the main factors influencing the adoption of cryptocurrency by both businesses and consumers as a payment method is its volatility. While Bitcoin’s price has risen by more than 50 million percent since its inception at $0.08, it has experience d many peaks and troughs in value along the way, making people wary of using it for consumption. For example, by the end of 2013, bitcoin had reached a fresh new high of US$1,164. But before reaching its 2021 peak, Bitcoin moved much lower before going higher — between 2014 and 2015, stagnation and volatility chipped away at the crypto’s value, reducing it to US$245 by October 2015, according to an analysis in Blockchain Investing News.

While there are certainly challenges in accepting Bitcoin for payments, especially when the price volatility is factored in, more and more merchants are looking to add crypto purchasing to their business. According to a survey last year by BitPay, “up to 40% of customers that pay with crypto are new to the merchant. Second, purchase amounts are twice that of credit card purchases. Third, crypto is less expensive than card cards, and lastly, there are no fraud-related chargebacks”.

Bitcoin has received a lot of attention as a store of value, which is why people like Mark Cuban consider it digital gold. Unfortunately, the use of cryptocurrency in daily payments has been hampered by high transaction fees and relatively slow transaction speeds. BigONE believes that now that AMC has decided to accept Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum, the use of crypto will become more attractive to businesses. With Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are designed to be faster and cheaper versions of Bitcoin, they could be better suited for digital payments going forward.

That said, the recent legalization of Bitcoin in El Salvador shows that adoption of BTC for payments can come from unexpected quarters. As reported in Cointelegraph the recognition of Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender has opened up new payment options for its citizens, with fast-food empire McDonald’s accepting payments in the cryptocurrency through the Lightning Network. “Lightning Network will likely prove invaluable if El Salvador hopes to achieve the mass adoption of Bitcoin payments. Beyond immediate transactions, however, El Salvador’s Bitcoin gambit could prove successful by streamlining global remittances, increasing the wealth of its citizens and attracting crypto-focused entrepreneurs to the country,” the report concluded.

Is it worth using crypto to buy movie tickets?

Popular cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, are all available for purchased on the BigONE Exchange. The question is whether these are better suited for long term investment, than for everyday payment purposes? On the other hand, cryptocurrencies are not company stocks; some were intended to be used as a payment method from the outset. Therefore, improving the cryptocurrency industry’s practicality and adoption rate will be critical to its success in this regard. However, to use your digital currencies as a regular payment method, you should always consider transaction fees and cryptocurrency volatility.

A clear use case for cryptocurrency comes with international money transfers, for example, with low transfer fees and fast transfer speeds, and anyone can use it. “However, Bitcoin has become less attractive for remittances due to the increasing cost of Bitcoin transactions. Some competing cryptocurrencies, such as Ripple and Dash, are also targeting the remittance market with substantially lower fees,” suggested a recent report in Investopedia.

Another critical factor to consider in crypto payments is taxation. Many countries worldwide require cryptocurrencies to be taxed as property. In addition, the holder must report the cryptocurrency’s time of use and purchase and may be subject to capital gains tax. Thus, using your cryptocurrency is the same as selling it to the US tax authority, the IRS. Recording transactions may work for large purchases, but it could prove difficult and expensive for small payments, such as movie tickets. As reported in Forbes, this is because in the US crypto taxes are based on a 2014 ruling that determined cryptocurrency should be treated as a capital asset, rather than a currency like dollars or euros: “Let’s say you bought $20 worth of Bitcoin and held it as it rose in value to $200. If you used the bitcoin to buy $200 worth of groceries, you’d owe capital gains taxes on the $180 in profit you’d realized — even though it seems as if you spent the Bitcoin, rather than sold it. For the IRS, it’s the same thing.”

In simple terms how you use cryptocurrency depends on why you hold cryptocurrency in the first place. For example, if you believe in the wider benefits of decentralization, you are more likely to take advantage of AMC’s new payment option, to pay in crypto for the latest movies. However, you should also regard cryptocurrency as a long-term investment. Indeed, whether AMC’s move will be copied by its competitors remains to be seen. There’s also plenty of support on Twitter in response to the tweeted announcement. Twitter user @SackarisJames and self-proclaimed AMC stockholder posted: “Here come all the ‘why would I spend Bitcoin on movie tickets’ people but in the next breath ‘we need more places to accept crypto, so it becomes a form of currency’”.

 #anndyliansays

 

Shorten version can be found at: https://hackernoon.com/are-crypto-payments-going-mainstream-with-amc-news

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j