Why Amazon Doesn’t Need Crypto
However, their recent partnership with Worldpay could signal ripple in the future
Amazon has been pretty silent when it comes to crypto. Facebook has been able to give hints in the past few months, but they’ve been sharing more details recently which include some new insights to their roadmap starting with remittances in India. They need to do this so that they can attract developers to be part of their mission. Being part of that mission comes with a responsibility to try to address the issues that they’ve had recently when it comes to privacy & reputation. A great read is the recent piece “Zucked” by Roger McNamee. We put together a product presentation of some potential and speculative directions of where a WhatsApp can go here. https://docsend.com/view/hmkba3e . While many other messaging providers and platforms are looking at pegging their stablecoins to the dollar, Facebook is looking at pegging it to a basket of currencies.
Now let’s get back to Amazon. This hackernoon post shares some great insights when it comes to Amazon’s transaction times and their limitations. We all know that when it comes to crypto, the main utility is being a immutable ledger that is decentralized. When it comes to transaction times and velocity, older and more stable blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are not the perfect choice. To add more context, bitcoin takes 7 transactions per a second, while ethereum takes 15 transactions per second. Amazon normally peaks at 600 transactions per second. Ethereum has been focusing on various levels of scaling on their roadmap, but they are still not where Amazon needs to be for a supporting blockchain. Although these needs are not met yet, this doesn’t mean that Amazon is still completely out of the game. The Hackernoon post shares some interesting information that Amazon recently bought amazonethereum.com, amazoncryptocurrency.com, and amazoncryptocurrencies.com
Several companies are reselling Amazon gift cards for crypto and with Amazon doing this they could cut out the middleman, but will that really be the big plan? Probably not. First, they would need to figure out how to handle the transaction speeds. This always distills down to the build or buy decision. They can either build their own blockchain or build on top of something that meets all of their use cases. Ripple would be the natural choice with their transaction speeds testing to 1500 tps. A great signal of this is Amazon recently teaming up with Worldplay The article states that “From now on, Worldpay merchants will be able to use Amazon Pay with the goal to enhance their clients’ online checkout experience. The online publication further notes that Amazon Pay Vice President Patrick Gauthier says that it’s a huge step forward for their payment service because it will become available for a broader audience from now on. This move also reflects Amazon’s desire to make the payment service available to a more expended audience”.
“We started to really think about how [we] not only simplify integration and onboarding but [how to] better manage operations on an ongoing basis. We decided the best solution for us was to integrate with a large merchant acquirer, as that simplifies a lot of the day-to-day issues around settlement, reconciliation, reporting and dispute management,” Gauthier noted.
This is great if Amazon doesn’t see themselves ever topping that speed as a roadmap item, but not if Amazon is looking to push the envelope further as they relentlessly drive their masterplan. The currency can take a much larger and integral role on their overall offering because their own ecosystem of various services are based on a fractional methodology. When it comes to buying AWS, there are various tiers and units to measure capacity that can easily be converted into a tokens. Replacing the purchasing utility of all their services with a crypto backed currency which can also be a stablecoin provides both fractional ownership, utility to services, & liquidity from secondary markets. Don’t be surprised by the sleeping giant if you see a stablecoin in the near future. As CZ from Binance mentioned, it could be a necessity in the future.
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