Rumors that Amazon
Whispers began to circulate over the weekend after Insider broke the news that Amazon was seeking a Digital Currency and Blockchain Product Lead. "You will leverage your domain expertise in Blockchain, Distributed Ledger, Central Bank Digital Currencies and Cryptocurrency to develop the case for the capabilities for which should be developed," goes the job description. The rumor mill managed to spin these and other key details from the job posting into a full-on tapestry of tongue-wagging.
City A.M., a London-based financial broadsheet, later published an interview with an Amazon "insider" who said Amazon's ambitions were far more comprehensive than simply developing a crypto-based payment method. According to the insider, not only would Amazon begin taking most mainstream crypto's by the end of the year, but it would also begin minting its own digital tokens by 2022 as part of a "multi-level infrastructure where you can pay for goods and service or earn tokens in a loyalty scheme."
Despite the imminent tone of City A.M.'s source, Amazon moved quickly to temper expectations for the time being. "Notwithstanding our interest in the space, speculation that has ensued around our specific plans for cryptocurrencies is not true," a company spokesperson wrote in an email.
However, Amazon did claim to be inspired by innovation within the crypto space while vaguely hinting at "new technologies that enable modern, fast and inexpensive payments," which the company said it hopes to bring to its customers as soon as possible.
Amazon's interest in cryptocurrencies has rarely strayed beyond the underlying technologies used to secure digital transactions. The company has translated this interest into a blockchain-based offering for its AWS cloud service.
"We don't see a lot of practical use cases for blockchain that are much broader than using a distributed ledger," said Amazon's current CEO, Andy Jassy, at a company event in 2017. "We don't build technology because we think the technology is cool, we only build it if we think we can solve a customer problem and building that service is the best way to solve it."
Bitcoin managed to reach $40,000 once again on Wednesday, even after Amazon dispelled the rumors. At the time of this writing, the tokens price has since stabilized around the $39,000 mark.
