💥Always Be Scheming💥
Retail Ecommerce Ventures & RadioShack, BBBY, Omnicare + Maverick Gaming & More.
Callback to this classic …
… which is well worth your time because … man … 2022 was f*cking wild. The memes were meming. The grifters were grifting. The yield seekers were yield seeking (the Fed Funds Rate was basically 0). What a time to be alive.
The piece 👆 was a “learning in public” exercise — a deep dive into the attempted resurrection of RadioShack Corp., the specialty electronics business that filed for bankruptcy twice (2015 and 2017) only to be scooped up by a shady outfit called Retail Ecommerce Ventures (“REV”).* In late ‘21 cascading into early ‘22, REV tried to relaunch RadioShack as an incomprehensible crypto project meant to leverage the “iconic brand” … 🙄 … to usher in the “…first [DeFi] protocol to pass over into mainstream usage….”
Or something.
It made no sense then.
It makes no sense now.
Still. Do you need a refresher on “decentralized finance” a/k/a DeFi? We wrote:
“DeFi is a new(ish) global peer-to-peer decentralized financial services construct existing on public blockchains (mostly Ethereum) where pseudonymous participants (if they wish) can borrow, lend, earn interest, and perform all sorts of other financial transactions on “decentralized exchanges” (DEX) allegedly without the associated third-party middlemen (i.e., like banks, brokers, payment processors) and inefficiencies (i.e., cost and time) of Wall Street. The DEXs are supposed to be faster and more open, private, and flexible than traditional financial institutions. We’re not going to opine on whether those assertions are accurate, though two things can apparently be true at once: billions of dollars can transact in DeFi (like they did in ‘21) while billions of dollars can also be stolen in DeFi (like they were in ‘21). On the latter point, just last week blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis released a report indicating that “[s]cammers took home a record $14 billion in cryptocurrency in 2021, thanks in large part to the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms….” This seems like just the type of space a twice-bankrupt company would want to go. 🚀”
Clearly our Spidey senses were tingling.
In an effort to be fair, however, we nevertheless engaged in a multi-thousand word explainer as a hedge against our pessimistic and cynical boomer tendencies.
Go ahead and re-read it: we were obviously too fair. And that’s even when you consider that we closed with this:
“RadioShack DeFi feels like a combination and an evolution of degenerative themes we identified earlier with meme stocks and GM WAGMI. Distressed retailers have brand value — look no further than reviews for Netflix’s documentary The Last Blockbuster. Thus, they become a prime target for crypto projects that must develop a community following quickly in order to build momentum and enthusiasm. To point, RADIO’s emergence onto the crypto scene appears well-organized. The RADIO community already boasts 1,600 members in the Discord channel and RadioShack’s Twitter account boasts a staggering 170k followers. That’s a lot of people to get behind a comeback story! It sure seems like Atlas USV borrows RadioShack’s global brand value (be it as it may), sprinkles it with a little bit of crypto pixie dust, uses this glint of familiarity to lure in noobs, and then gets them into the Atlas USV ecosystem. After all, 170k followers = a lot of marks.”
We continued:
“Compounding our skepticism is the amount of conflicts baked into this one. Digging a bit into the org chart, RadioShack DeFi is affiliated not just with Atlas USV but with Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), a holding company with majority ownership of the IP of several brands, many of which were at one point bankrupt, e.g. Pier 1 Imports, Steinmart, Dressbarn, Linens N Things, and Modell’s. REV’s Executive Chairman is social media wealth influencer Tai Lopez, who sells ‘get rich’ courses on his website to his 10mm+ followers; his YouTube business videos have been watched for over 2b total minutes. Having someone like Mr. Lopez as the face of the brand isn’t, in our humble opinion, exactly confidence inspiring for crotchety distressed guys like us. But we respect his hustle: he’s clearly a keen marketer. It’s clear that Mr. Lopez has a plan to leverage an otherwise unfocused brand and use it to tap into cryptomania. If it works, he can also tap into other formerly distressed IP later. All to help engender mainstream adoption of DeFi — or, to be cynical, just focus a spotlight on USV, which, again, it appears he also happens to financially benefit from.
Unfortunately, all the players here may have mistimed their
potential griftexperiment. Crypto markets took a major tumble below $2T in market cap before rallying back slightly (BTC is down 8% and ETH is down ~15% in the past week alone). It’s not clear how far out the risk curve crypto speculators are willing to stretch for new projects. We’ve done our best to give RADIO a fair shake: we’ve combed through the white paper, joined the community, and directly pinged RADIO’s developers with our many questions. We’re not ready to definitively call this a scam just yet: the developers have assured us that many of our outstanding questions will be answered in due time, with promises of more information to come.Still, we can’t help but think that crypto’s push into distressed land is just another sign of the times. Whether it’s DistressedDAOs or ReorgCo-backed tokens such as $RADIO (and perhaps later, $SMART, $LINEN and $PIER1), we’re always open to innovation and fresh use cases for formerly-distressed-assets — provided that they are actually legitimate. If the crypto bros want to come calling at bankruptcy auctions, we’re all ears. Their money is green. We just hope that, at the end of the day, that innovation isn’t a cleverly-disguised pump & dump targeted to the mainstream. If it is, you know we’ll come at ‘em guns blazing.”
Fast forward and … well … what happened to RadioShack DeFi?
C’mon.
That dumb sh*t failed almost immediately.
And, after flirting with a formal chapter 11 restructuring in ‘23,** REV ultimately unceremoniously blew up, selling its business for parts. For its part, REV sold RadioShack in May ‘23 to a company called Unicomer Group.*** But not before Mr. Lopez and his bros (allegedly) got up to some shady-a$$ sh*t. Is it time for us to cock the guns?
No need. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) beat us to it. On September 23, 2025, the SEC dropped this beaut: