In brief
- GameStop has made over $47 million this week selling IMX tokens that were granted to it by Immutable as part of its partnership agreement.
- IMX jumped in price after yesterday’s partnership news, but now is down 23% over the last 24 hours.
Video game retailer GameStop took a major step forward with its planned Ethereum NFT marketplace this week, announcing plans to use the Immutable X layer-2 scaling solution to power its initiative. However, it appears that GameStop has already dumped a bulk of the IMX tokens it received as part of the alliance, yielding $47 million in the process.
Data from Ethereum blockchain explorer Etherscan shows that GameStop sold just under 15 million IMX tokens this week across three transactions, split between the cryptocurrency exchanges Huobi, Binance, and OKX. Twitter user polka first detailed the sales this morning in a now-viral tweet thread.
The last of those transactions took place yesterday, following the announcement of the partnership, after the IMX token surged in price. GameStop sold just over 8 million IMX tokens at a value of more than $27.4 million at the time. The previous transactions this week yielded about $18.6 million and $1.1 million, respectively, bringing GameStop’s take to over $47 million.
According to a document that GameStop filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, Immutable agreed to grant the company with more than 56.2 million IMX tokens as part of the deal.
The disbursement schedule was based on various milestones as GameStop announces and eventually launches the NFT marketplace. So far, according to Etherscan data, GameStop has received nearly 37.5 million of those tokens, matching the schedule detailed in the document. The document suggests that Immutable will ultimately provide approximately $150 million worth of IMX tokens to GameStop as part of the arrangement.
The IMX token jumped up in price following yesterday’s announcement, as mentioned, reaching a high of $4.13 per data from CoinGecko. However, the price fell sharply as the latest batch of tokens that GameStop sold flooded into the market. IMX’s price is now down 23% over the last 24 hours at a current price of $2.94.
Decrypt reached out to representatives of both GameStop and Immutable for comment, but we did not immediately hear back. GameStop still holds nearly 22.5 million IMX tokens, which are valued at nearly $65.9 million as of this writing.
GameStop will build its NFT marketplace on Immutable X, which allows for faster, cheaper, and purportedly more eco-friendly transactions than Ethereum’s own mainnet. The partners aim to onboard developers of NFT-centric games (like play-to-earn games) with a $100 million fund that will provide IMX token grants. The developers' fund for token grants is separate from the tokens that Immutable has agreed to pay GameStop, per the SEC filing.
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