For those of you who are too young to remember, RadioShack is an old retailer that sold a lot of cool electronics from boom boxes to remote-controlled toy cars.
RadioShack Is Accomplishing a Lot
However, the company filed bankruptcy some years back and seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth. RadioShack has since returned, but with a major twist – the firm has stepped into the world of crypto and is allowing individuals to trade digital assets. Thus far, the company has managed to hit a $40 million trading mark in just a few months.
Alex Mehr – president of Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), which owns RadioShack – explained in a recent interview that the firm is probably seen as more valuable now than it ever was when it sold simple electronics equipment. He commented:
The launch of RadioShack Swap has been extremely well received, with daily trading volumes averaging anywhere from $500,000 to $2 million. The swap is adding two or three new tokens every week, and we continue to see robust interest among gaming-token startups. They understand that the RadioShack brand is congruent with their own play.
In addition to the rebranding, the social media pages of the company’s executive chairman Tai Lopez have greatly helped the company get back on track. To date, Lopez is active on a wide array of platforms including Discord, Telegram, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.
Thus far, the company boasts more than 10,000 individual traders on its exchange. Right now, RadioShack is available through four separate blockchains including Polygon, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Avalanche. The company has garnered a solid reputation thanks to its low fees, which at the time of writing, are only about 0.1 percent per swap. This is roughly one third of what many mainstream exchanges charge for similar transactions.
Mehr said:
People want to maintain control of their own crypto assets and be the stewards of their own private keys, but in addition to the security benefits that accrue from decentralized, peer-to-peer trading, RadioShack Swap offers additional safety protections. For example, RadioShack has measures in place to make it a little harder for scammers to dupe people with fake versions of popular tokens, a perennial problem elsewhere.
Rebuilding Itself Quickly
Aside from the crypto platform, the RadioShack team is working hard to bring its brick-and-mortar stores back. The company is going through a whole rebranding process according to Lopez, who mentioned in a statement:
We’re updating the look and feel to be smarter and cooler, with digital products like storage wallets and NFTs as well as crypto merch by amazing artists. The crypto scene is bursting with creativity, and we’re thrilled to make RadioShack.com a central marketplace and consumer-facing hub.
REV acquired RadioShack and all its assets back in November of 2020.