In the past few months the world was shocked to hear that social media giant Facebook was entering the crypto markets with the release of their cryptocurrency dubbed Libra. Although Libra has been met with mixed opinions from both those within the crypto community and those outside of it, many analysts do believe it will ultimately help the markets.
Additionally, the Libra hype also led to a significant amount of speculation about other major companies releasing similar crypto-themed products, but e-commerce giant Amazon is now squashing these rumors, boldly stating that they don’t deal in speculative technologies.
Amazon Gives a Hard Pass to Crypto Products… For Now…
Many analysts in the crypto industry believed that Amazon would closely follow Facebook with releasing a crypto of their own, and this belief was primarily rooted in the company’s “Amazon Managed Blockchain” product through their web services initiative, which seemed to signal an interest in distributed ledger technology.
Despite this, the vice president of Amazon Pay, Patrick Gaulthier, recently threw a wet towel on these rumors, saying during Fortune’s Brainstorm Finance 2019 event that now is not the right time to focus on utilizing speculative technologies like cryptocurrency.
“It’s fresh, it’s speculative; at Amazon, we don’t really deal with the speculative, [we deal] in the now,” he noted while responding to a question about Libra.
Although for now the Amazon crypto rumors have been put to an end, that doesn’t mean that Amazon won’t ever introduce a product, as Gaulthier said that he would be “happy” to discuss this type of tech further in two or three years.
“At Amazon, we deal with data a lot, so I’ll be happy to have that conversation two or three years from now,” he later said.
If Libra is Successful, Will Other Companies Follow Facebook’s Lead?
Although we likely won’t know for certain whether Libra is met with wild success until it launches in mid-2020, it does already have a plethora of noteworthy partners that clearly see some merit in its purpose.
In the past week, several large financial institutions have offered bullish analyses of Libra, with Bank of America noting that Libra will make a good addition to Facebook’s e-commerce initiatives.
“With more than 2.5 billion users, Facebook and its partners could be a significant endorsement of cryptocurrency and a notable addition to the Facebook app ecosystem… We see the launch as an important initiative for the company as it builds out a more private messaging ecosystem with eCommerce capabilities,” they said.
Assuming their assessment is accurate and it does begin significantly enhancing Facebook’s ecosystem, then it is likely that other large companies, like Amazon, that are currently hesitant to adopt this type of technology will begin entering the markets.
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