By
Bena Ilyas
April 22nd, 2024
The NFT marketplace announcement has impacted the investor push on GME shares which closed Wednesday’s trading up 14.50%.
Loopring (LRC), an Ethereum-based Layer-2 protocol and scaling solution, has been seeing very bright days as it unveiled its partnership with an American video game, consumer electronics, and gaming merchandise retailer, GameStop Corp (NYSE: GME). As unveiled by the blockchain protocol, GameStop has released the Beta version of its Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace which is built on the Loopring protocol.
For the first time in a long while, LRC took the spotlight and printed a growth of over 34%, the biggest gain on Wednesday as reported by Coindesk. The reasons for the growth are not far-fetched as investors believe Loopring has proven it has a place in the emerging world of metaverse-focused innovations, and the GameStop partnership is one of the most important ways to show it.
At the time of writing, Loopring has pared off most of its gains and is currently trading at $1.11, up 0.98% in the past 24 hours and by over 54% in the trailing 7-days period. The NFT marketplace announcement, which is slated to be officially rolled out later in the year, has also impacted the investor push on GME shares which closed Wednesday’s trading up 14.50% to $141.
Why Loopring Was Chosen by GameStop
The gaming ecosystem has been mapped out as one of the most crucial areas that will help blockchain technology gain a prominent adoption rate among non-crypto natives. As the global gaming industry is quite big, blockchain protocols have been making a push to build value in this regard and to do so, Ethereum has been tapped as the protocol of choice for its legacy and capabilities.
The Ethereum blockchain as we know it today is replete with a lot of challenges including the inability to scale properly and the incidence of congestion which generally makes users pay more in transaction fees. These challenges typically impair the use of the Ethereum protocol and have necessitated the emergence of Layer-2 protocols like Loopring.
To power, a broad-based gaming ecosystem or NFT marketplace such as GameStop is aiming at a cheaper, more user-friendly, and scalable protocol which Loopring seems to provide.
“In order to return Power to the Players, access needs to be fast, cheap, and secure for the masses. GameStop, in partnership with Loopring, has the opportunity to cement itself at the forefront of this new paradigm and become the destination for global digital economies,” said Adam Browman, Loopring’s Head of Growth, adding that to “accomplish this, the new Marketplace built atop Loopring L2, ensures that users receive the strongest digital property rights anchored by a secure, decentralized and credibly neutral environment like Ethereum. Loopring zkRollup inherits Ethereum’s self-custodial security while abstracting away costly gas fees, leaving no one priced out.”
In actualizing its push into the blockchain ecosystem, GameStop has been partnering with a number of other active players in the field, the latest prior to the Loopring announcement being Immutable X which is backed with $100 million in grant offering back in February this year.