The store where you purchased parts to build your first computer or bought your first walkman is all grown up and getting into the cryptocurrency game.
Cryptocurrency is confusing, and so is Fort Worth-based Radio Shack’s rebranding.
Essentially Radio Shack is looking to transform from yesterday’s electronic technology sales company to the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) provider of tomorrow, claiming it will be the “bridge between company leaders and the new world of cryptocurrencies.” To do this, the one-hundred-year-old company plans to launch its own token: RADIO.
So how did Radio Shack get to this space? The company hit hard times, filing bankruptcy in 2015 and again in 2017. It was sold multiple times until it ended up in the hands of investors Tai Lopez and Dr. Alex Mehr of Retail Ecommerce Ventures Review (REV) in 2020. REV still owns Radio Shack and its 500 brick and mortar stores; however, now Lopez and Mehr hope to use name recognition to bring the older generation to the crypto world.
REV plans on doing this by building its DeFi system on its Atlas Universal Store of Value (USV). USV, which is owned by Mehr and Lopez, is described on its website as “a universal, decentralized, and widely accessible DeFi base layer, on which many future projects can be built by the Atlas community and its partners.”
The “Atlas community and partners” include Pier 1, SteinMart, Linens-N-Things, and Dress Barn.
There are many directions this could go; Tom’s Hardware had some interesting suggestions on how Radio Shack could use its brick and mortar stores in the NFT space.
Radio Shack has changed and evolved over the last 100 years and appears poised to continue its transformation.
