frens, I've written about the upcoming NFT marketplace from GameStop a few times and I didn't expect anything to come for a long time. The beta just launched and it's getting a lot of attention.
GameStop NFT Beta
Since the initial announcement a few months ago that GameStop was going to be revived with an NFT marketplace... I had seem multiple articles and such suggesting that it would be built on Immutable X. I even wrote a post or 2 about the Immutable X partnership, where Immutable gave them a shit ton of tokens that they immediately dumped. I guess the partnership was just an investment because it's official - GameStop NFT is built on Loopring. Loopring is a L2 solution for Ethereum similar to Polygon. It allows users to take advantage of the security and network effect of Ethereum's mainnet without the insane fees and slow transactions. This news came out today via a Medium article by Adam Browman, the Head of Growth for Loopring. The NFT marketplace will take advantage of zk-Rollup technology and use Loopring's DEX to process transactions up to 2000 per second. Power to the Players amirite?
Poking around the website, another gem revealed itself. GameStop is building a crypto wallet for your browser! Man, they are really taking this shit and running with it. I don't know that I'd ever actually use GameStop Wallet, but it's cool to see then really trying to show how focused on NFTs they are. I connected via Metamask since it's what I use for most Web3 things. When you connect your wallet it lets you know that everything takes place on Loopring layer 2 and that you need to "activate" it by depositing ETH. I don't have any ETH sitting in my wallet so I didn't do it right away. I was more just trying to see what little gems I could find on the site. Clicking on your wallet, you can go ahead and edit your profile if you choose to do so.
You can even add links to your Reddit, Twitter, and add a profile picture. As I suspected, you can't just go uploading any JPEG to use as an avatar. You will have to own an NFT on Loopring in order to set it as your avatar. I'm not sure if just any NFT will be able to be used as an avatar, but I'd assume so. They might do it where only certain collections are supported though.
No "right click, save as" shenanigans are gunna go on here with the NFT avatars being verified. That's pretty much the meat and potatoes of it. This is an early beta access so users can prepare for the launch of the marketplace. Not much to see other than the amount of hype around Loopring now. The LRC token is up some insane percentage like 50% since the announcement. I'm really surprised that they didn't just use Polygon if they were going to use something other than Immutable X. I have to say I am actually a bit disappointed that they aren't using Immutable X since it requires no ETH deposit for activation and it's literally purpose-built for NFTs.
Overall I think the response has been overwhelmingly positive. There's some die-hard GameStop fans out there... Combine that with some NFT degens and really you get the perfect marriage here. The amount of hype that's happening around the different social media platforms surrounding this is wild. I saw reddit going absolutely insane over it this morning so I recommend hopping over to the Cryptocurrency subreddit to take a scroll through a lot of hype. I just wonder if the people that pay for the PowerUp Pro memberships are going to be able to link their accounts and get rewards points. Would be really cool if users could earn "cashback" in the form of GME tokens. Lemme know what you think.
Thanks for reading! Much love.
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