By
Mayowa Adebajo
March 12th, 2024
After the smartphone revolution, one of the most revolutionary technologies with which almost every business today wants to get associated with one or the other way is the ‘Blockchain Technology’.
Blockchain technology clubs the merits of both – financial and technological worlds thereby coining out a new term known as ‘Fintech’. One of the major reasons blockchain technology has turned so prominent in the past year is because it is the same technology which supports the now most famous cryptocurrency ‘Bitcoin’.
Recently we have seen that companies associated with the Blockchain technology are getting a lot of visibility in the markets and Overstock.com is a classic example of this. Overstock, which is basically a retail company specializing in clothing and furnishings. However, over the past few years, the company has increased its exposure to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies and as a result, there has been a 31% uptick in the shares of Overstock.
Earlier this year, Overstock CEO Patrick Bryne announced that its e-commerce subsidiary ‘tZero’ will be launching an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) the private sale of which is to commence this week from November 15 and will go on till the end of 2017.
During this period, Overstock plans to gain a sum of whopping $500 million by the year-end. In this project of Automated Trading System (ATS) for the trading of digital tokens issued via ICOs, tZero has made a joint venture with other groups like RenGen and Argon Group.
D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte, who has been covering Overstock’s share price since long says that the company has recently hinted to sell out its home e-commerce business. Owing to this, Tom Forte has even corrected its target price to $85 from its initial target of $57.
This means that as per Forte, the stock still holds a potential rise of next 60% from the current levels. Forte believes that the markets have yet to realize and appreciate the potential of Overstock’s Medici Ventures Division which was launched back in 2014 and has spread its roots in the blockchain technology ever since.
Forte said, “We now see the possibility of unlocking value in its two most significant assets — its home e-commerce effort and Medici Ventures (portfolio of nine companies that, to varying degrees, leverage the blockchain).”
Another independent investor. Marc Cohodes has also been bullish on this stock and predicted back in October that the Overstock share price has the potential to touch $100. With Medici Ventures, Overstock made its first entry into cryptography technology and ever since then the company has been associated with nine different who have their strings attached to the Blockchain technology in one or the other way.
Slowly the widespread benefits and applications of Blockchain technology are being realized by multiple organizations who are now working on several projects to unlock its true potential. Not only private multinationals but government agencies are also trying out this technology across different sectors like infrastructure, banking etc. One thing is sure that the market is set to expand further and slowly with time we can see blockchain technology touching almost every dimension of businesses.