The stock price of popular video game store chain GameStop (GME) surged roughly 13% in one day amid rumors circulating online regarding a partnership with Microsoft to work on NFT gaming.

At the time of writing, GME sits at $115.60 as of market close on Feb. 8 and has also held around that level in after-hours trading according to data from TradingView.

GME started February at around the $100 region and has been pumping this month on the back of GameStop’s partnership with NFT focused Layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution Immutable X to develop its upcoming NFT marketplace. As part of the deal, GameStop is also rolling out a $100 million grant program denominated in IMX tokens for NFT content creators and tech developers.

The latest rumors circulating via channels such as Reddit and Twitter suggest that GameStop may team up with Microsoft to launch NFT integrations into existing games, along with creating new NFT focused games.

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Digital collectibles” issued by Shanghai Securities News are trading at least 13 times their original price on China’s largest second-hand trading platform, despite state media’s criticism of the non-fungible token (NFT) frenzy.

Fast facts
In China, the phrase “digital collectibles” is often used to avoid references to NFTs.
The collectibles are now available on the Alibaba-owned Xianyu, China’s largest online second-hand trading platform, for reselling and auctioning, with prices ranging from 269 to 1,000 yuan (US$42 to US$157).
The original selling price of each collectible was 19.9 yuan (US$ 3.13).
Shanghai Securities News’ 5,000 digital collectibles, representing newspaper front pages to commemorate China’s capital markets development, were instantly sold out after they were offered on distribution platform TheOne.art on Monday.
The collectibles were distributed in mysterious boxes, and buyers needed multiple purchases to collect all five front pages.
Amid Beijing’s cautions over NFT trading, Chinese tech giants have pledged to resist speculation in digital collectibles, with Alibaba’s blockchain subsidiary AntChain requiring a 180-day holding period before a buyer may resell to avoid “malicious hype.”

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Reem Al Faisal, the photography-loving Saudi Arabian princess, recently announced the launch of her first Saudi non-fungible token (NFT) collection on Opensea and an art gallery in the metaverse.

Photography Career
Saudi princess Reem Al Faisal has launched her first NFT collection, called “Mekkah and Madinah,” on the Opensea marketplace, as well as an art gallery in the metaverse. The NFT collection features the Saudi shrine, Al Kabbah, while six Saudi artists are featured in the art gallery.


According to a post on her Instagram account, the Saudi princess says the launch of the NFT collection adds another chapter to her long career as a photographer which started in her childhood. She is quoted by Unlock Media explaining:

Today we made history by the first exhibition of Saudi NFTs in the Metaverse. I have been photographing all my life, since I was a child, and therefore I don’t consider it a career as much as part of me. It is as natural to me as talking or breathing.

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Treasury Warns of Money Laundering
The U.S. Treasury acknowledged NFT-based art today, focusing on money laundering and possible regulation of the sector.

The Department of the Treasury published a press release and report on illicit finance in high-value art markets, in which it took particular note of the emerging NFT sector and its capacity for money laundering.

The Treasury specifically warned that NFTs can be used in self-laundering, a practice in which users spend funds on an NFT that they already own in order to create obfuscated transaction trails on the blockchain.

This sort of money laundering was one explanation offered when a CryptoPunk NFT was sold for more than $500 million in October 2021.

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A collaborative NFT project from belagued Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and pseudonymous digital artist Pak is set to drop next week.

Assange has been confined in a London prison since April 2019 after his asylum status in the Ecuadorian embassy of London was terminated. The following month he was indicted on 17 counts of espionage in the Eastern District Court of Virginia relating to classified documents he published on Wikileaks.

His legal team is currently fighting an extradition case which could see him face the charges in the United States and spend the rest of his life behind bars.

The project with Pak — who generated a whopping $91.8 million last year on Nifty Gateway last year from his project dubbed the “The Merge” — is set to come out on Monday, coinciding with the deadline for Assange’s legal team to plead its case.

The name of the NFT drop is called “Censored” and refers to Assange’s journalistic history of reporting on classified material relating to corruption, crime, war and spying. It is unclear if the proceeds from the sale will go towards supporting Assange, or whether it is purely focused on bringing attention to such a highly monumental day.

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This piece is part of a series that features interviews with Bitcoin miners about their experiences setting up and scaling mining operations, as well as their views on the direction of the mining world. If you are mining Bitcoin and want to share your knowledge and story — the ups, downs and innovations — reach out to the author on Twitter @CaptainSiddH. I met my interviewee for this piece, @TechEngineer21, because he reached out!

For this interview, TechEngineer21 went over his simple yet powerful home heating system. I hope this system can be an inspiration for hobbyists, since it doesn’t require a big budget or sophisticated knowledge and tools to assemble yourself. With just three S9 miners, TechEngineer21 no longer needs to use his gas furnace to heat his home. He shared a mountain of data collected by his smart home system and a full walkthrough of how his heater operates. You can find TechEngineer on Twitter (@TechEngineer21) and YouTube (Tech Engineer).

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Ethereum rides ahead on the crypto market’s most recent trend to the upside. As of press time, ETH, BTC, and larger cryptocurrencies show signs of recovery with potential for continuation in the short term, if they manage to break above their resistance levels.

As of press time, Ethereum (ETH) trades at $2,788 with a 6.5% profit in the last 24 hours.



Data from Arcane Research indicates that Ethereum has seen its seventh 50% drawdown since its inception. The second crypto by market cap dropped to a yearly low of $2,200 which represents a 55% decrease from its high at $4,812.

During the crypto market most recent downside trend, ETH lost a total of over $280 billion in market cap which represents its biggest decline on this metric since its launched. By taking ETH’s price as a proxy, it is possible to conclude the altcoin market as a whole suffered deeply in the past two months.

In that sense, Arcane Research determined that this bearish price action to its yearly lows was one of Ethereum slowest in its history. It took ETH’s price around 75 days to reached $2,200 compared to a 38-day average.

Conversely, Ethereum has always experienced a higher average in terms of recovery. It takes ETH’s price an average of 165 days to returned to previous highs, per conclusions from Arcane Research. The firm added the following on the cryptocurrency’s recovery periods, and its worst period to date, the crypto winter of 2018:

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Voice NFTs: Just when you think that the NFT bubble is at peak stretch, along comes another absurd but brilliant offering that boggles the mind about what people will pay good money for.

The world’s first voiced NFTs, sold by an outfit called Voiceverse, launched with 8,888 NFTs on January 29th. The NFTs in question sold out in less than 10 minutes of public sale.

Three BAYC members formed Voiceverse Origins. They have added voice clips over BAYC NFTs and have created some originals NFTs, loaded up with voice clips.

The company say the sales frenzy “is a highly rare occurrence for NFT collections stored on the Ethereum blockchain.” The march of the NFT gravy train chuggs on!

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