Amazon.com’s payments team is exploring letting customers use cryptocurrencies to pay for their orders — a development that’s roiling digital currency markets.
An Amazon job posting published online last week seeks a “digital currency and blockchain product lead”. After Insider, a news website, reported the existence of the posting earlier, bitcoin surged to near US$40 000.
“You will leverage your domain expertise in blockchain, distributed ledger, central bank digital currencies and cryptocurrency to develop the case for the capabilities which should be developed,” the posting says. “You will work closely with teams across Amazon including AWS to develop the road map including the customer experience, technical strategy and capabilities as well as the launch strategy.”
(AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is the company’s cloud computing group, which builds software and other technology products for other companies.)
Amazon is a sprawling company that backs a broad range of experiments, meaning initiatives cited in job postings don’t always become new products. But the company confirmed its interest in cryptocurrency.
“We’re inspired by the innovation happening in the cryptocurrency space and are exploring what this could look like on Amazon. We believe the future will be built on new technologies that enable modern, fast and inexpensive payments, and hope to bring that future to Amazon customers as soon as possible,” the company said in a statement after reporters spotted the posting.
Blockchain
Amazon doesn’t currently let customers pay with any cryptocurrencies. But AWS sells a blockchain technology infrastructure product.
At an event a few years ago, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company was closely watching blockchain developments but struck a sceptical tone about the technology.
“We don’t yet see a lot of practical use cases for blockchain that are much broader than using a distributed ledger,” Jassy, said at a press conference at a company event in 2017, when he led AWS. “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.” — Reported by Matt Day, (c) 2021 Bloomberg LP
