GameStop Picks NFT Market Partner in Challenge to OpenSea

Vlad Savov and Olga Kharif, Bloomberg News

The GameStop Corp. app on a smartphone arranged in Hastings-On-Hudson, New York, U.S., on Friday, Jan. 29, 2021. GameStop Corp. advanced on Friday and was on track to recoup much of Thursday’s $11 billion blow after Robinhood Markets Inc. and other brokerages eased trading restrictions on the video-game retailer. Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- GameStop Corp. is teaming up with Sydney-based Immutable on a new marketplace for non-fungible tokens and setting up a fund valued at about $100 million to promote NFT projects.

Under the agreement, GameStop will use Immutable’s technology for an NFT trading hub, which it plans to launch on the Ethereum blockchain by the end of the year. The Australian company, in turn, will pay GameStop up to $150 million in IMX, Immutable’s token, depending on transaction volume. The two companies will support creators for their platform with up to $100 million in IMX.

Grapevine, Texas-based GameStop, a favorite among meme stock investors, gave its share price a fresh boost when it announced the move into NFTs in early January. It’s the latest pivot for Chairman Ryan Cohen, whose push to reinvent the brick-and-mortar games seller into a digital-first retailer sparked a fervor for the stock last year. The expansion will give the company an opportunity to capitalize on the hottest commodity in the crypto world.

GameStop is going up against the likes of OpenSea, the largest market for NFTs. The startup takes a 2.5% cut of every transaction and was valued at $13.3 billion in January.

The Immutable collaboration helps GameStop by providing the back-end for its marketplace and capital for enticing game developers and artists to join. The IMX token, released in November, was worth about $3.15 a piece on Thursday and has average daily liquidity between $50 million and $100 million. Immutable charges a 2% fee per transaction but saves users the so-called gas fees for minting and trading on Ethereum, co-founder and President Robbie Ferguson said in an interview.

Immutable, which raised $66 million in its most recent fundraising in June, plans to integrate its protocol with OpenSea as well as GameStop’s trading hub. It sees these collaborations as key to driving exposure and liquidity for assets on its platform, which is focused on gaming as the most immediate path to making NFT trading popular and accessible, said the 25-year-old Ferguson.

Immutable’s token IMX gained as much as 46% in the last 24 hours, before declining to a more modest gain, according to tracker CoinGecko. Its market cap is currently $126 million higher than it was yesterday, according to CoinGecko.

(Updates with Immutable token price in the last paragraph)