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Loopring (LRC), a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) that utilizes zkRollups, is under a renewed limelight today amid GameStop’s (NYSE:GME) growing NFT and crypto-related footprint.

To wit, Wall Street Journal has now revealed that GameStop has established a dedicated NFT-focused unit and has hired over 20 people to work on this initiative. The unit aims to establish a marketplace for NFTs in collaboration with game developers and content creators.

Of course, this news should not come as a surprise to our readers. We have been highlighting GameStop’s NFT-related moves in multiple posts over the past few months (read here and here). However, the report does increase our confidence in the prognosis of an eventual partnership between GameStop and Loopring. To wit, WSJ reports that the video game retailer is close to signing a partnership deal with two crypto companies:

“GameStop also is close to signing partnerships with two crypto companies to share technology and co-invest in the development of games that use blockchain and NFT technology, as well as other NFT-related projects, the people said. The retailer expects to enter into similar agreements with a dozen or more crypto companies and invest tens of millions of dollars in them this year, the people said.”

We have reason to believe that GameStop and Loopring are closer than ever to signing a formal partnership. As we've noted in a dedicated post previously, certain snippets of the source code from Loopring’s GitHub profile reference “gamestopmeta” in the “NFT-DEV” amended code branch, suggesting a high likelihood of integration with GameStop’s upcoming NFT-focused platform. Then, GameStop’s new job posting for a “Product Owner - Head of Web3 Gaming [REMOTE] In Seattle” caught our roving eyes. The job requires not only familiarity with “all new NFT/crypto projects” but also a working knowledge of “integrations with different blockchains and Ethereum Layer 2 environments”. Bear in mind that the LRC is a Layer 2 protocol on Ethereum. Taken together, these developments bolster the probability of some type of partnership between GameStop and Loopring.

As a refresher, Rollups are a Layer 2 (L2) solution that aggregates and processes transactions outside of Ethereum’s main blockchain. These processed transactions are then bundled and posted on the main chain, thereby increasing Ethereum’s transaction processing power or scalability by orders of magnitude and bypassing its prohibitive transaction processing fees (gas fees). Loopring uses a new type of Rollup, dubbed the zkRollup (zero-knowledge Rollups). A zero-knowledge proof makes a claim regarding the accuracy of a particular data set without actually sharing that data. This is done by generating proofs based on cryptographic computations for each batch of transactions. Since zkRollups do not require a challenge period, as the validity proofs have already verified the legitimacy of the underlying transaction data, transactions can be processed very quickly. In fact, Loopring claims that it can process over 2,000 trades per second. For obvious reasons, this transaction processing power is critical to the success of GameStop’s NFT marketplace.

Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/loopring/

Investors seem to concur with this prognosis. Over the past 24 hours, Loopring is up over 6 percent. The coin, however, still has a long way to go to capture its all-time high of $3.83 back in November 2021.