Is GameStop Developing an Ethereum-Based NFT Platform?

There has been no official confirmation yet, but industry observer going by the Twitter pseudonym ‘croissant’ has been connecting the dots for their 53,400 followers.

News that GameSpot was developing an NFT platform originally broke in late May when the company stated that it was “officially getting into NFTs.”

It launched a website at the time that contains very little aside from a big clue in the form of a large Ethereum logo.

GameStop and Ethereum Tie-Up?

The gaming giant made a bucket load of money earlier this year following the famous GME stock short squeeze in late January. As pointed out by “croissant”;

“It gave GameStop a tremendous treasure chest of funds to work with and use to advance their new CEOs vision of becoming the Amazon of gaming.”

A massive surge of users are about to come to $ETH.

Why?

The news of GameStop launching an NFT platform broke back in July, but after digging a little deeper I’ve connected the dots to something even bigger

I’ll detail this information in the thread below… 🥐

— croissant (@CroissantEth) September 1, 2021

Integrating NFTs with GameStop may enable the firm to onboard millions more users, the analyst added.

According to Jordan Holberg, Principal Engineer of GameStop, the company aims to become the “bridge between the old and the new — traditional “legacy” e-commerce and the next generation of blockchain.”

Additionally, many recent company hires have been from the crypto and blockchain space, backing up GameStop’s intentions to go all-in on NFTs. “Croissant” took the narrative a bit further, adding:

“It would allow their users & traders to easily interact with a wider range of decentralized, authenticated applications without compromising any privacy. The move to ETH, a censorship resistant network, is a very significant step for their entire user base…”

Major Partnerships

The analyst also pointed out that GameStop also has major partnerships with the likes of Hasbro and Microsoft’s Xbox, as well as a number of eSports teams. Intellectual property laws may be hindering mainstream NFT adoption at the moment, but Ethereum can already solve this through its ENS (Ethereum Name Service) system – the decentralized equivalent to DNS.

“It’ll bring millions of eyes to $ETH with even big companies being able to easily deploy their intellectual property in a verifiable, *understandable* manner. This is huge.”

The conclusion made was that GameStop might be laying out the framework for the widespread adoption of Ethereum.

In its current state, however, there is little chance that Ethereum Layer 1 could support the onboarding of millions of users. The recent NFT craze has sent gas prices skyrocketing yet again, so Layer 2 solutions will be needed for any new major platforms based on Ethereum.