GameStop (GME+1.36%) has become the latest publicly-traded U.S. company to put cryptocurrency on its balance sheet.
The video game retailer bought 4,710 Bitcoin, it announced Wednesday morning in a single-sentence press release. The purchase is worth around $509 million at current market prices, with Bitcoin hovering around $108,000. Shares of GameStop rose nearly 3% in premarket trading.
The move continues the trend of companies raising capital to stockpile Bitcoin as treasury assets. Trump Media & Technology Group tapped investors for $2.5 billion to fund a cryptocurrency reserve, it revealed yesterday.
GameStop’s move adds to the 30 companies with Bitcoin reserves listed on the Nasdaq, with treasuries worth a combined total of more than $85 billion — about 2% of the coin’s total market cap.
The rise of online shopping and streaming services has plunged GameStop’s brick-and-mortar business into relative obsolescence over the the past decade. Its shares declined 95% between 2013 and 2020.
GameStop, which was founded in 1984, became a “meme stock” in 2021. Meme stocks refer to shares in ailing businesses that gain popularity among retail investors through social media. So-called “degenerates” on Reddit augmented a mass purchase of shares in the ailing video game retailer — a trade that shook Wall Street. It soared 21-fold over a two-week period before crashing to pre-surge levels in a matter of days.
A meme stock frenzy has taken place in recent weeks, which GameStop looks to be capitalizing on. Its shares are up more than 20% in one week, while shares in AMC Entertainment (AMC-1.68%) are up 38% this month.
GameStop’s foray into crypto isn’t surprising. The appeal of meme stocks — volatility, anti-establishment, viral — is analogous to meme coins. Traders thus typically also trade crypto tokens, and GameStop has a cult-like status among the community.
It’s just one of many attempts by CEO Ryan Cohen to revive the business since he took over in 2023. In 2020, Cohen wrote a public letter to GameStop’s board urging them to scale back real estate, recruit tech talent and develop an e-commerce platform that could be competitive in the modern gaming economy.
The company has also made several attempts to diversify its offering: It unveiled a series of “retro” branches, selling nostalgic games, last year, and has some stores dedicated to merchandise.
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