WallStreetBets, whose community became famous by short squeezing GameStop stock by working together on social media platforms like Reddit, has launched a blockchain powered application to “decentralize indices,” according to an announcement.
“Prominent figures” inside of the WallStreetBets community have been interfacing with FinTech and blockchain experts to make exchange-traded portfolios (ETPs). The ETPs are similar to index funds, but they can be run in a fully decentralized fashion, according to the announcement.
In a Wednesday (May 12) televised appearance on CNBC about the app, WallStreetBets Founder Jaime Rogozinski said, “We know the benefits of blockchain, and we’ve seen it over the years: the transparency, the security of it, the democratization of it.”
To that end, Rogozinski told CNBC that the app takes “the power of community to be able to come together to vote on a regular basis” in a “much more nimble manner — much faster — to rebalance these ETPs or ETFs [exchange-traded funds] and put them on the blockchain and [combine] asset classes from both the crypto world … as well as regular stocks or even ETFs.”
According to the announcement, the WallStreetBets Decentralized Application (DApp) will be governed by the way of a $WSB governance token that holders can harness to have their say in rebalancing and exposure of every instrument owned by the community.
In the event that a token holder thinks that a given stock should constitute 90 percent of a certain ETP portfolio instead of 10 percent of it, she can vote on it by inking a transaction with her $WSB tokens at the time of voting cycles.
“The amalgamation of blockchain technology with financial markets is the next logical step for finance — and not just for Wall Street but everywhere,” Rogozinski said in the announcement, which said he is a “strategic partner of the WSB DApp project.”
As previously reported, r/WallStreetBets members started buying up GameStock shares in early January, which, in turn, pushed up the price.
Shares of GameStop went from approximately $20 at the beginning of January to almost $350 on January 27. They were trading at approximately $150 as of mid-afternoon on Wednesday (May 12).
