Brian Quarmby
The share price of Reddit’s cult-favorite stock GameStop Corporation (GME) jumped by one quarter in after-hours trading following a Wall Street Journal report on its upcoming nonfungible token (NFT) division.
The United States retail game store giant has been quietly working on an NFT marketplace since May and ramped things up in October by listing several job openings for Web3 and NFT-experienced software engineers and product marketers.
According to a Thursday report from The Wall Street Journal, GameStop has now hired more than 20 people to operate its freshly minted NFT unit.
An unnamed source familiar with GameStop’s plans told the outlet that the unit is building an NFT platform that enables the buying, selling and trading of gaming NFTs, along with establishing key cryptocurrency partnerships.
The marketplace is slated to launch later this year, and the firm is said to be close to penning partnerships with two crypto companies that will share technology and co-invest in the development of blockchain and NFT games, along with other additional NFT projects.
The news was warmly welcomed by after-hour traders who drove the price of GME up 26% since the market closed to sit at $162.48 at the time of writing, according to TradingView. After-hours trading is often quite volatile due to a lack of liquidity in the market but impacts the price of a stock in a similar way to regular trading.
However, The Wall Street Journal’s lack of named sources or direct confirmation from GameStop has raised the eyebrows of some more conspiratorially minded GME fanatics. In a post that has 1,100 comments and a 97% upvote ratio on the r/Superstonk Reddit community, user u/brettmagnetic questioned whether The Wall Street Journal article could actually have that much of a bullish effect on after-hours GME trading.
Brian Newar
Sports nonfungible token (NFT) minting platform and Animoca Brands subsidiary Lympo suffered a hot wallet security breach and lost 165.2 million LMT tokens worth $18.7 million at the time of the hack.
A short Medium update from the Lympo team stated that on Monday, hackers managed to gain access to Lympo’s operational hot wallet and “stole a total of approximately 165.2 million LMT from it.”
According to the post, 10 different project wallets were compromised in the attack. It appears that most of the stolen tokens were sent to a single address, swapped for Ether (ETH) on Uniswap and SushiSwap, then sent elsewhere.
LMT’s price tumbled 92% to $0.0093 after hackers transferred then sold the loot from the project’s hot wallets.
A subsequent Tuesday tweet from the team stated that it was “working on stabilizing the situation and resuming all operations back to normal.” The team also stated that it had removed liquidity LMT from liquidity pools to “minimize disruption to token prices.”
Removing liquidity from pools that trade LMT means that traders will be unable to buy or sell any significant amount of the tokens without experiencing a dramatic loss of value on their trade.
Ezra Reguerra
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of crypto exchange FTX, reportedly called out regulators to create a single framework for digital assets in the Asian Financial Forum, an event organized by Hong Kong's government to highlight new opportunities within the region's economic landscape.
The businessman pointed out that instead of focusing on determining whether assets are securities or not, regulators must focus on consolidating the regulations and creating a rule book on crypto.
Bankman-Fried also noted that a framework that focuses on disclosure and the prevention of fraud may be more important than labeling assets as securities or not. While the FTX CEO didn’t specify which regulatory bodies he was calling out, many regulators worldwide are focused on classifying whether tokens are securities or not. However, he is convinced that this will not protect investors.
Additionally, the crypto billionaire also highlighted how there are regulatory frameworks for other asset classes, noting that the same should be done for digital assets.
This is not the first time that the young exchange founder engaged with regulators. Back in December 2021, Bankman-Fried along with other executives from prominent crypto firms were called to attend a committee hearing, where they urged US regulators to provide regulatory clarity on digital assets.
This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
