By Speculations are rife that Amazon the e-commerce giant may soon join its fellow big-league companies and launch its own cryptocurrency or stable coin. Fintech companies and organisations with a huge following and user base have lately taken to launching their own cryptocurrencies. Facebook for example, with an average of 1.59 billion people logging into its platform daily, plans to launch its own stable coin Libra. The same goes for Walmart, that has around 265 million customers visiting its 11,500 physical stores located in 27 countries per week and they have already launched its stable coin WMT.
Presuming that the trends are nothing to go with, Amazon has made many moves that expose its interest in cryptocurrency and blockchain-based technology. Reportedly, in 2017, the worlds largest business domain news source, Domain Name Wire, reported that Amazon had registered three blockchain and cryptocurrency-related domain names. The intentions for the registration of the domain names are still subject to speculations.
Amazon might be prepping in the background
Amazon has also developed and registered a fully managed ledger database known as Amazon QLDB. The ledger database is capable of being used to develop other blockchain-based applications. Further, its partnership with other blockchain-based platforms such as R3, Consensys, and IDEO CoLab goes to show the deep interest it has in the digital currency technology. It also gives credence to the speculation that it may soon launch its own stablecoin or cryptocurrency.
The speculation is gaining momentum given that unlike Facebook and Walmart, Amazon has well over 95 million people as prime members in the United States of America alone. It has done much extensive research and partnerships with blockchain-based platforms as compared to the two. Amazon has even gone further ahead to obtain a patent in May this year, for developing Merkle trees. Merkle trees are set to provide a solution to the proof-of-work algorithm deployed in cryptocurrency.
However, according to reports, Amazon Pay vice president Patrick Gaulthier, has constantly dismissed the speculations stating vaguely that Amazon does not wish to enter into ‘speculative areas,’ although the benefits that the stable coin brings in comparison to credit cards and other modes of payments such as lower processing charges, cannot be ignored. Amazon may be therefore be forced to accept other cryptocurrencies for payments in future at the risk of large e-commerce losses if the vice president’s words are to go with.
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