By Samuel Indyk
Investing.com – A job advertisement on the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) website suggests that the company is looking to launch a new payment product, starting with Mexico, that will enable customers to convert their cash into digital currency. The customers would then be able to use the digital currency for their online services including shopping for goods and/or services like Prime Video.
The project has not yet been announced by Amazon but a second job posting suggests the project may be aimed at emerging markets initially. The job postings were first identified by cryptocurrency news site Coindesk. There is no mention of cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology specifically in the job postings or when the project would expect to launch.
Corporate news
The story comes in a week when Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) announced they had bought $1.5bln worth of bitcoin to diversify their reserves. The amount equates to approximately 8% of the company’s cash reserves.
Separately, the Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) CFO said yesterday the company is considering doing something similar but this would only happen if vendors and/or customers would prefer to do transactions in bitcoin. As yet, no decision has been made by the social media company but it is something the company has discussed.
Whether Amazon looks set to follow suit still seems a long way off. New CEO Andy Jassy does have previous with the technology, having previously built a blockchain on Amazon Web Services. But whether the shift leads to a larger-scale take up of digital payments on the Amazon platform in the future remains to be seen.