Amazon will soon accept bitcoin for payments, as the Payments Acceptance & Experience Team seeks a product that will develop its Digital Currency and Blockchain strategy.
Commenting on the announcement, an Amazon spokesperson said: “We believe that the future will be built on new technologies that enable modern, fast and cheap payments and we hope to bring this future to Amazon customers as soon as possible.”
It is unclear at this time whether Amazon’s Bitcoin payment application will include the use of the Lightning Network or how Amazon will integrate Bitcoin directly into its users’ payment options. Amazon is expected to first accept Bitcoin, then Ethereum, Cardano and Bitcoin cash, and there are also rumours about it having its own token.
This position marks, however, a decisive turning point for the global e-commerce organisation, whose products and services are ubiquitous on the internet. In November 2017, Amazon Pay vice president Patrick Gothier explained that the company did not plan to accept Bitcoin, as there was not enough demand for it, and had bought Bitcoin-related domains just to protect its brand.
At the peak of demand in 2017, Bitcoin reached a market value of $336 billion. Four years later, the market capitalisation of Bitcoin exceeded 1 trillion dollars. If Amazon starts to facilitate payments in Bitcoin, it will surely introduce millions of users to the unchanged distributed ledger technology, significantly accelerating its adoption and familiarising the public with a Bitcoin standard.
