To be clear, the radioshack of today isn’t the one you remember from the past. It went from being brick-and-mortar to ecommerce. And the transition was all but quickly. RadioShack filed an 11th bankruptcy in the year 2015 after 11 consecutive financial quarters in the red. Afterwards, the brand was sold multiple times, until finally they were acquired by a holding company called Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), owned by Tai Lopez and Alex Mehr (these names will be relevant in a little bit). REV still holds RadioShack brand – and as a way to “bridge the gap and ‘cross the chasm of mainstream usage for Cryptocurrency.” The goal is to make RadioShack one of the most powerful companies in the cryptocurrency market by increasing its value from $3 trillion to $250 billion. RadioShack’s executives plan to do this by focusing “on the early majority.” It’s coming first to come to the market with a 100 year old brand name that is widely recognized in 190 countries in the world. Because of that, technology hasn’t been available: a brand name that peaked in the first hundred’s and then collapsed. RadioShack is building the DeFi ecosystem in partnership with the Atlas USV (Universal Store of Value), a DeFi protocol that allows decentralized applications to be built on top of it. RadioShack plans on creating a decentralized exchange (DEX) in the vein of the U.S. embassy. This “allows USV users to purchase third-party tokens in the open market and then transfer them to the Atlas USV treasury in exchange for discounted USV tokens.” Interestingly, the American company Atlas is a small and unofficial cryptocurrency startup. It hasn’t yet been picked up by CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap that track over 10,000 different crypto assets in circulation around the world. But its token, USV, can be sold on DEXs already. This is available on the Ethereum and Solana chains. USD $448 is currently an actual cost of the unit. If you’re wondering who set up Atlas USV, you’ll have to test your recall capabilities. It is the brainchild of Tai Lopez and Alexander Mehr. I’ve been seeing the first picture of the second of two. 2 image from 2 from 2 in 3 in 3 Essentially, RadioShack is getting started to receive tokens that have already established market value. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Atlas USV tokens were all staked and will be consolidated as liquidity pools. The users who stake these coins (that means they commit their cash flows and lock them in a smart contract that prevents them from being moved) will then receive RadioShack’s own token, RADIO. Uniswap proved it’s an efficient and rigorable way of starting the DEX. Stakers get investors, and they immediately add to RadioShack’s financial services, and they leave their valuable cryptocurrency in their trust. It’s also a tried and true strategy for rug-pulls, though especially in the DeFi space. Here, the crypto space we are talking about isn’t a problem. The good coexists with the bad. RadioShack is far from the top of its retail stores. In 2003, the company had more than eight stores in the US alone, and established a presence in the South Americas and the Middle East. The stock of the stock and 500 other retailers is an interesting element of the technological pivot, so it’s reasonable to use all the space to actually extract cryptocurrencies out of their abstract, digital presentation. Considering the interest RadioShack had expressed in the blockchain space, it seems to be a clear possibility that the company could then explore Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) next. Perhaps the retail locations could be useful here, too. RadioShack could imagine running them as social spaces, for acquisition and trading of those new technologies. Maybe RadioShack is gonna even sell digital versions of its most historic brick and mortar stores in a digital plot? RadioShack will do better to thread lightly, though, regardless of how deep the dive takes to cryptocurrencies. There are still a wide range of corruption and frauds in the crypto space. They snagged almost $7.7 billion in the legal market in 2020 already. Brands can die if they make the wrong betting, no matter how historically tried and true they feel. And while a brand like RadioShack certainly has more name recognition than most other crypto worlds, it’s still clearly on shaky ground and playing in a complex, fast-moving space.
