RadioShack, and RadioShack alone, can bridge the gap’
RadioShack, the venerable retailer relaunched as an online-focused brand in 2020, now wants to chart a future as a cryptocurrency exchange. Earlier this week, the company announced RadioShack DeFi (short for “decentralized finance”), a market where people can swap newly announced RADIO tokens as an alternative to a centralized exchange like Coinbase. Moreover, RadioShack insists that it’s uniquely positioned to take cryptocurrency mainstream — claiming that “RadioShack, and RadioShack alone, can bridge the gap and ‘cross the chasm’ of mainstream usage for cryptocurrency.”
RadioShack’s argument is basically that as a very old brand, it’s primed to sell old CEOs on cryptocurrency. “Too many [cryptocurrency companies] focused on speculation and not enough on making the ‘old-school’ customer feel comfortable,” the company’s website states, claiming that the average “decision-making” corporate CEO is 68 years old. “The older generation simply doesn’t trust the new-fangled ideas of the Bitcoin youth,” particularly not “adults who are especially authoritarian, intelligent, and well-read (i.e., the CEOs that RadioShack seeks to woo).” Its parent company, Retail Ecommerce Ventures, also owns a variety of other brands like Pier 1 Imports and Dressbarn, and RadioShack speculates about the possibility of a brand like Pier 1 launching its own token through RadioShack’s system.
If you want to read about RadioShack’s strategy, there’s a series of pages explaining the system, which is built on a protocol called Atlas USV. Decrypt also delves more into the parties behind the move. RadioShack is known as a consumer brand, but here, the broad goal is to become a platform that other companies (RadioShack cites Louis Vuitton, Starbucks, and Mercedes-Benz) use to run their own distributed finance projects. You can join a waitlist to be notified when the RADIO token launches.
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