GameStop, the well-known US video game store, now has its own wallet for cryptocurrencies. This is an Ethereum (ETH) wallet for ETH and ERC-20 tokens, as well as non-fungible tokens (NFT). The company revealed this via Twitter on May 23.
It’s official! The GameStop Wallet is here.
Download: https://t.co/GkxiRaYN7W
Follow: @GameStopNFT
🧵👇— GameStop (@GameStop) May 23, 2022
Ethereum self custody wallet
The GameStop wallet is a self custody wallet, or a digital wallet where the user is responsible for their stored crypto. The company warns against the risks surrounding this kind of product.
You are responsible for your own password and for your so-called recovery phrase. If you lose these, you lose access to your wallet and the stored crypto might be lost forever. GameStop emphasizes that its employees will never ask for your password and/or recovery phrase and that you should not share them with anyone. The company also underlines that this is a beta launch; therefore, there may still be errors and vulnerabilities in the program.
Furthermore, the new crypto-wallet uses a layer-2 scaling solution for faster transactions on Ethereum. This is the layer-2 network of Immutable X (IMX). Gamestop announced in February that it also plans to launch an NFT marketplace in partnership with Immutable X later this year. The price of IMX is currently barely reacting to the news while it was still causing an increase in February.
Crypto retail FOMO
GameStop (GME) shares attracted massive attention from private investors early last year, mostly from the social media platform Reddit. At the time, it came out that institutional investors were massively shorting the company due to the corona pandemic, but that turned out differently than expected when private individuals invested heavily.
Subsequently, this “retail fomo” spread to crypto and especially infamous meme tokens like dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB). These prices then rose at an unprecedented rate, but have since both fallen again by almost 90%. Recently, a similar situation seemed to play out with the privacy coin monero (XMR).