In late January, US retail investors and Wall Street giants clashed over the stock (NYSE: GME) of the game store chain GameStop. GameStop has been short-selling by institutions due to the decline in revenue in recent years. Retail investors on the Reddit stock discussion board are dissatisfied with the decline in its stock prices. They concentrated their chips to push up the GME stock price, short squeezed the institutions, and forced the institutions to cover their stocks and then push up the stock price. In the end, GME’s stock price rose by more than 400%.
Retail Investors’ Excitement Spreads Across Crypto MarketThe discussion of this event extended to the crypto space that also targets the decentralized traditional financial system. The number of subscribers to r/Bitcoin of Reddit, the largest online forum in the United States, exceeded 2 million on January 29 and gained 210,000 followers within a week. There are currently 2.18 million subscribers.
However, after the surge in GME stocks, many brokerages announced restrictions on the trading of hugely volatile stocks such as GME and AMC. Among them, Robinhood caused a huge rebound after announcing the prohibition of users from trading GME stocks, and users filed a class-action lawsuit. The purchasing power of retail investors spread to encrypted assets with excitement. On January 28, Dogecoin and Bitcoin prices began to soar.
At the same time, FTX, a derivative-based crypto asset exchange, took advantage of the opportunity to launch GME’s equity tokens and quarterly contracts. Less than a day after it went live, the spot trading volume of GME’s equity tokens has exceeded $1.4 million, while GME’s quarterly contracts accumulated to more than 9 million US dollars.
Not just centralized exchanges, DeFi developers created the ERC-20 version of the decentralized Wrapped Gamestop (GME) token. According to Etherscan statistics, the total supply of GME is 10 million, with an initial price of S$0.23. The price rose to US$5.39 in just one day, which was an increase of 958% in 24 hours. The daily trading volume reached $720,000 and the 24-hour trading volume was $360,000.
KD, VP of global business at MXC Exchange (
www.mxc.com), a crypto asset trading platform with daily trading volume accounting for 5% of the global market, believes that as Robinhood ceases trading in stocks such as GameStop and Nokia, and Nasdaq President and CEO Adena Friedman called for regulations to prevent retail investors from coordinating and cooperating on social media. The incentives to use cryptocurrency will only grow stronger.
“The more traditional financial giants oppress and prevent retail investors, the stronger their motivation to enter the crypto world.” KD said.
New Investors Rushing InIn fact, a new wave of investors is rushing into the crypto market due to this incident.
Data shows that in the past week, the trading volume of CEXs and DEXs has increased. Binance’s Bitcoin spot and FTX’s Bitcoin futures both surged last Friday.
KD believes that the logic of the skyrocketing of exchange-based tokens is the same as that of stocks. In fact, users are optimistic about the platform business after platform tokens. For example, the value of MX is supported by its OTC transactions, currency transactions, leveraged transactions, leveraged ETFs, contracts, index products, POS mining pools and other businesses.
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