This post was originally published on this site
GameStop Corp. shares were pointing to a double-digit surge after a report that it was launching a division to develop a marketplace for nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, making a foray into the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
Shares of GameStop
GME,
were up more than 30% on solid volume of around 1.7 million shares in after-hours action Thursday, which doesn’t always translate to gains in regular trading on Wall Street.
Still, the news appeared to deliver a jolt to the meme asset that tends to move on social-media trends and less on fundamentals.
The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that GameStop has hired nearly two dozen people to run an NFT platform, which is intended to be used for trading the virtual assets within videogames.
The report said GameStop is asking select game developers and publishers to list NFTs on its marketplace when it launches later this year, the people said.
GameStop’s retail trading “Apes” have been expecting news of an NFT marketplace and a crypto play for months, believing that it is a key part of company chairman Ryan Cohen’s turnaround master plan, and they’ve been more than a year to hear it since Cohen, as an activist investor, took a large stake in the videogame retailer and sparked the short squeeze of January 2020.
Much of Thursday’s after-hours action was seen by the Reddit crowd as proof-positive that they’ve been right all along.
Shares of GameStop were up 1.3% on an otherwise downbeat day on Wall Street Thursday, where the S&P 500 index
SPX,
the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
and the Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
all finished in negative territory, amid persistent concerns about inflation and about hawkish policies to combat pricing pressures by the Federal Reserve.
GameStop’s shares, however, for the week are down 11.7%, FactSet data show.
The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch’s sister publication, wrote, citing people familiar, that GameStop was “close to signing partnerships with two crypto companies to share technology and co-invest in the development of games that use blockchain and NFT technology.”
