GameStop is getting out of the non-fungible token (NFT) arena.
In an update posted on its GameStop NFT website, the company said it has decided to wind down its NFT marketplace “due to the continuing regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space.”
“Effective as of February 2, 2024, customers will no longer be able to buy, sell or create NFTs,” GameStop said in the update. “Your NFTs are on the blockchain and will remain accessible and saleable through other platforms.”
GameStop unveiled its NFT marketplace in July 2022, saying it would let gamers, creators and collectors buy, sell and trade the digital art collectibles.
The marketplace lets users connect their own digital asset wallets to the marketplace and allows them to own their assets, which are secured on the blockchain.
Two months before unveiling the marketplace, in May 2022, GameStop jumped into NFTs and crypto by introducing a digital asset wallet for sending, receiving and using cryptocurrencies and NFTs on several decentralized apps without leaving their web browsers.
The news of the winding down of the NFT marketplace comes about five months after GameStop’s Aug. 1 announcement that it would end support of that digital asset wallet on Nov. 1.
In a message posted at the time, the company advised customers to ensure that they had access to the Secret Passphrase that enabled them to recover their account in any compatible wallet.
As with the NFT Marketplace, GameStop attributed its ending of support for the digital asset wallet to “the regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space.”
Sales of NFTs fell 63% in 2023, despite a tripling of volume between October and November, Bloomberg News reported Sunday (Jan. 14), citing data from CryptoSlam.
While GameStop is winding down one investment, the company is potentially embarking on a new one, Seeking Alpha reported Thursday (Jan. 18). The company’s board of directors approved a new investment policy last month that lets CEO Ryan Cohen and the management team invest in equity securities and other investments.
The company’s previous policy restricted GameStop to investment grade short-term income securities when looking to invest excess cash, according to the report.
Mobile wallets are well-designed for instant gratification — as that ubiquitous instrument, the mobile phone, makes it easier than ever to pay merchants or to complete a P2P transaction with speed, especially as real-time networks go live across the globe.
But a smooth path between senders and receivers (despite both wielding mobile wallets) across borders is lacking, as there’s no widespread interoperability between networks. Recent research in collaboration between TerraPay and PYMNTS Intelligence indicates that 42% of consumers prefer to send cross-border payments via digital wallets — leaving a staggering greenfield opportunity of 58% of individuals. The opportunity stretches across 5.2 billion mobile wallet users and trillions of transactions, as people travel, conduct cross-border commerce and send remittances.
For TerraPay, which started a decade ago (with the working name “interoperable exchange”), the initial starting point in simplifying global money movement took its cue from the telecoms, and the fact that SMS messages could cross competing carriers’ networks — one of the earliest forms of interoperability.
But as Ani Sane, co-founder and chief business officer at TerraPay, told Karen Webster in a recent interview, moving money is about more than just the transaction: “It’s about compliance, regulations and reconciliation, and settlements and scheme rules.” Building a network to handle those complexities is no easy task, given the fact that as Sane said, digital wallets operate in silos, on the regulatory and technological sides of the equation, as they’re designed to work in a particular country.
TerraPay has been building a network to that allows banks to leverage their existing Swift relationships and send payments to be integrated into TerraPay’s platform to enable payments between digital wallets. The banks, he said, do not have to conduct any technical heavy lifting for that connectivity or to bring digital wallet options to end customers. Additionally, TerraPay connects to merchants, enabling them to accept digital wallet payments — and thus the thousands of wallets operating across the globe mimic the almost universal acceptance of physical cards at physical and digital points of sale.
“On our platform,” in 2024, “more than 50% of our transactions globally were delivered to mobile wallets … they were small-value ticket sizes,” he said, “but sending money to a wallet instantly is a great opportunity for banks to serve those small-value customers and businesses.”
There’s already broad familiarity with global fund flows, as the data shows 70% of consumers use cross-border transactions to pay and receive remittances and 77% of businesses generally engage in business-to-business cross-border transactions with suppliers.
That global reach, Sane said, will broaden financial inclusion. As he told Webster, “When you look at the underbanked and underserved segments” of the world, “and you look at mobile wallets [held] by that segment, it matches up almost 100%.”
COVID, especially, has made us all global citizens, and as such, we want to be able to transact globally. Sane recounted how TerraPay’s initial tests with merchants at duty-free shops at the Dubai airport revealed that offering M-Pesa, Airtel or other payment options through the interoperability network made African travelers landing there enthusiastic consumers.
“The point is to build that trust between merchants,” he said, “without having to think about which [payment] schemes have done the best. It’s a long journey … and we’ll need more efforts from the merchant side of this.”
Looking ahead, Sane said, “What we are trying to do is create the infrastructure to create the ‘rule books’ of reconciliation and settlement mechanisms … for both the wallets and the merchants and to do cross-border what they do domestically. … It’s an amazing tool to be able to use the mobile wallets as financial instruments.”
