Bitcoin Forum

Recently, the founder and CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao in his twitter account said that sooner or later, Amazon will have to issue its own cryptocurrency. What caused such assumptions and will Zhao announcement become reality?
How it all started?

At first the Binance founder stated in his Twitter that he does not understand why any e-commerce business does not accept cryptocurrency. Later on, in the same post, Zhao listed some of the main features and benefits that a cryptocurrency can offer compared to traditional payment methods.

https://paperblockchain.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/image-1.png


Read more : https://paperblockchain.com/amazon-might-have-to-issue-a-cryptocurrency-soon/ (https://paperblockchain.com/amazon-might-have-to-issue-a-cryptocurrency-soon/)

Because of demand. I struggle to believe that Zhao doesn't realize this - I suspect he is just being deliberately facetious.

Take Amazon as an example. Amazon is ubiquitous. It already has an enormous market share all over the world. How much do you think their profits would increase if they started accepting crypto. Sure, some people, maybe even quite a lot of people, would move from paying in fiat to paying in crypto, but how many new customers who have never used Amazon before would start using Amazon solely because they started accepting crypto. Not many.

Now think about how much effort it would take for Amazon to integrate crypto payments - everything front the front-end development right through to the new regulations and tax paperwork, some of which barely exists in many countries. It would be a huge undertaking for very little monetary gain, and after all, these private companies are first and foremost interested in profit.

But we can't deny the positive aspects. Crypto payments would allow people from poor countries who are afraid of using their local currencies to order stuff from Amazon. The problem is they aren't that global yet and there are many shipping restrictions. I found out multiple times that I either had to pay more for something to be shipped to my country or that it's unavailable for shipment for whatever reason. Usually because they aren't shipping big items worldwide.

I've seen Amazon described primarily as a logistics company. Accepting payments is the easy part. Getting the product to the customer is often not and I doubt Amazon would risk wrecking that to serve territories who may not offer them much in the way of profit.

Accepting crypto makes no sense for them. Existing crypto users can use gift cards, but they're more interested in hoarding. The 99+% of their customers who don't have it have no reason to pay with it either.

If its binance that is going to help do the ICO for Amazon, this won't end well . BTT is the most recent proof that its going to be another pump and dump. But then again, this is going to be a huge promotion for cryptocurrency. If amazon is going to be really doing it, the best course of action is to find ways to have good amount of funds ready to buy after the price dip.

A collaboration and possible cooperation with this two company would make a big impact in cryptocurrency this year. Isn’t it late for over a year or so, before this implementation must have been done. The top exchange will support and help the highest and most popular online markets like amazon.

With proper negotiations on going (IF) is highly on time for the next run of crypto popularity that has been paused last year.

Amazon coin would be a big hit.

Zhao said this because Wordlfirst closed its business and many sellers were using it, but Amazon won't jump in the crypto world just to make the sellers happy. Some others will take the slots, no problem because yeah the company is so big (and the demand is so small). On the top, Amazon seems to prefer focusing on blockchains platform with AWS rather than the crypto industry.

Oh, there are plenty of positive aspects for sure. Amazon are probably losing hundreds of millions of dollars each year to credit card fees, which is by far the most common purchasing method. Even a fee of 1% would work out as over a billion dollars given their revenue of ~$180 billion. This could all be extra profit for them if they started accepting bitcoin. It's not like they don't know about bitcoin, so we can only assume the cost-benefit analysis is not favourable for them at the present time.

On a side note, Jeff Bezos reckons there will be 1 trillion people living in solar system at some point (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/15/blue-origins-jeff-bezos-predicts-1-trillion-humans-in-the-solar-system-wired-summit.html). That's an awful lot of people to split not many bitcoins.

It's not that simple. They'd need to worry about converting those coins into fiat. A processor like Bitpay charges 1%, so it's looking less lucrative already. If consumers demand it, I'm sure it'll eventually happen, but I see no real signs of demand from consumers.

I'd be surprised if a company the size of Amazon didn't just set up their own process or mechanism to convert as much as they wanted to to fiat rather than relying on a 3rd party.


Exactly. Unless there was serious competition in the form of a crypto marketplace or similar hurting their bottom line, then they have no real reason to go to the effort. Their revenue is ~$180 billion in fiat. An extra million or two in crypto just isn't worth it.

At a certain point, that's true, but only if they expect immense new revenue. They'd need to develop a robust wallet and custody solution. That takes a lot of staff time and development money, ongoing maintenance costs, and also introduces custody risks. Saving 1% in processing costs has to be measured against what they'll lose in a potential compromise, and that's on top of development and maintenance costs.

There's plenty of incentive for a company like Coinbase to pour money into this stuff because they're raking in huge % commissions. The potential upside is much bigger. I really wonder what it would take to create that sort of incentive for Amazon. My feeling is that we're decades away, if ever.

This is wishful thinking.Amazon won't care about cryptocurrencies untill the global crypto market reaches atleast 1 trillion USD(or probably  more).This market cap has to be reached only due to the massive crypto adoption and without any bubbles,market manipulation  and hype(highly unlikely to happen).

I think chargebacks alone should be a big bonus for many people and the increased security should also benefit a lot of people. eCommerce payment systems like credit cards and PayPal are not even close to be the ideal solution for these kinds of applications, because it is by nature ineffective by being centralized technologies.

Why we are still using these ancient technologies are beyond me, Bitcoin is much better and also widely accepted.  8)

That's just the thing. Bitcoin isn't widely accepted. This is still the early adopter phase.

Amazon would love to accept BTC if customers really wanted it -- it's a merchant's dream. I assume they don't bother because there isn't actually strong demand for it, and if there were, there may not be enough market liquidity to liquidate their coins without losses. It's just an unnecessary risk for them.

I'm pretty certain that Bitcoin's lack of short term scalability is more of a problem than that. It's just not interesting for them to accept it now, and I can't blame them for that. Amazon has such a massive reach world wide, that even a slight uptick in demand is enough to have the network become congested.

It all comes down to Lightning. It's just a matter of time before we see them hop on board after successfully having done some prior testing.

Amazon has always considered Paypal as a competitor and so has Paypal. Between them, it's a dog and cat story. And it's certainly the same between Amazon and Bitcoin. In addition, Amazon has no real interest in adding Bitcoin as a payment method. If this will help to increase the market maybe but it is not at all the case. Why should Amazon add BTC, knowing the demand in near zero

i could see them not wanting to ruin the customer experience if people are waiting many hours or days for a payment to confirm or be dropped from the network.

but i still don't see how that equates to demand from people to pay with LN. bitcoin is already a tiny niche for consumers; lightning is an even tinier blip on the radar. i can't imagine amazon is even remotely interested until bitcoin gets much, much bigger. implementing lightning would just generate losses when no one uses it.

He probably does realize it, but he would benefit greatly if companies started adopting crypto, because they would probably just use exchanges as payment processors.

Also, this article as a whole is pretty worthless, it's just a biased opinion of one man, it's not a business analysis or something. O hope this trend of releasing platform-based coins will die soon, because in real world no one wants to manage dozens of accounts.

Exactly, Amazon accepting some kind of currency won't help people in faraway forgotten countries to shop there.
You have problems even if your located in Poland and the Czech Republic with some vendors, but when it comes to Romania or Bulgaria good luck buying something, and Bulgaria has its currency pegged to the euro for more than a decade.

Besides, the cost is indeed prohibitive for heavy items outside the main routes as I checked a few months ago how much it will cost me to buy a UPS for my parents and with an extra 65 euros....not going to happen.


If Amazon will launch a coin it will probably be a stable coin pegged to the USD so I doubt it will be heavily traded on exchanges, and if it will be listed it will ruin a lot of the current stable coins, plus it will destroy the dreams of many tokens that were focused on being accepted as payments on a large scale.

Probably it will have the effect FB had, trashing almost every other social network that had no particular niche.

And I somehow doubt Amazon will launch a partnership with a company that fleed Hong Kong and then Japan to settle down in one of the last a bit legal offshore's still open for business in the EU. They have enough problems to associate themselves with Binance or Bitfinex or Btpay.

It's marketing. People here seem to be so tied to their this or that doesn't work way of thinking.

Bitcoin as an additional payment option doesn't cost anything if it isn't being used, but will very likely result in a wave of customers they otherwise wouldn't have. BitPay alone did +$1 billion in conversions last year, where it's safe to say that the far majority of this is related to Bitcoin.

Give people the merchants they frequently shop at, and this $1 billion will become +$2 billion, and more as time goes by.

Interesting that this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Coin is never, ever mentioned in this context. Amazon coins have been around for a quite a while now but you never hear anything about them. They're transferable between accounts but have limited uses.

True, but you are assuming that this was all from new customers. In the case of Amazon, who already have such a huge grip on the market, I'm not convinced they would gain that many new customers from supporting bitcoin. Sure, they would gain some customers, but I reckon most people who would utilise bitcoin payment on Amazon are already shopping there with fiat.

People who want a decentralized or private marketplace won't be looking to Amazon, regardless of payment method.

It depends on where you are I guess, but for me spending Bitcoin offers a convenient way to avoid taxation in a legal manner (i.e. spending Bitcoin is not a taxable event), and what's better than buying goods from one of the main ecommerce sites? I'm certain that there are enough people out there willing to spend their coins like this instead of donating 20-30% of it to the government by cashing it out to fiat.

These people are part of a minority that has no economical mass, and probably never will have. On top of that, they have decentralized markets to utilize already.

Easier said than done, from what I know if they do that they themselves would be competing their own payment system. Right now their Amazon Pay is acting like their own Paypal within the website, issuing their own cryptocurrency would only divide the interested parties who are using their credit/debit cards using Amazon Pay. Also Zhao didn't mention any problems Amazon is having with their current payment methods nor did I see any rumors supporting it so them issuing cryptocurrency is still far from reality.

Wait there's something I dont really get about your post because I checked the amazon coin link and the page was update last year and binance CEO statement was that amazon have to issue it own cryptocurrency soon.
Are you saying amazon already have it own coin? If yes, have you use it before?
Just need to be assure.

It's basically a gift card. You can only spend it on a few things, and not real products on Amazon. It's mainly apps for the Fire and Kindle stuff.

There will never be a reason for them to create anything more than that.

Up to this day there are still majority of that people doesn't know about cryptocurrency and how it works they only knew what is the negative side of it and on the other hand the banks are still there and maybe doing their thing to spread false news to cryptocurrency as it is a threat to them.

If Amazon started to accept cryptocurrency as a payment then I assume that the other e-commerce businesses will do the same, and that's the time we all wanted to happen.

Implementing Bitcoin support absolutely has costs.

They need to dedicate developer and server resources on an ongoing basis. They need to develop and maintain a robust wallet and custody solution, as well as a robust solution for currency conversion. They also need to account for custody risks. Or if they hire a processor like Bitpay, that's a 1% cost right there, which is only a tiny bit better than Visa. I also assume processors like Visa give giants like Amazon favorable fee arrangements as well, so Bitpay may in fact be worse.

I also strongly disagree that it'll "very likely result in a wave of customers they otherwise wouldn't have." What businesses implemented Bitcoin support and then saw massive growth? I remember several cases where businesses added Bitcoin then later dropped it because there was no interest. Adding Bitcoin as a payment option has never driven consumers to Bitcoin.

Besides, Amazon doesn't need to achieve growth that way. They are basically taking over the world by expanding their core logistics model and consolidating neighboring industries. As long as they offer all the major payment options consumers want, this is an afterthought to them at best.


I'm pretty sure that Bitcoin holders intent on buying stuff on Amazon already buy gift cards with bitcoins -- Bitrefill, Bitpay, other gift card malls. If they use it directly on Amazon instead (or on Amazon through Bitpay), I just don't see it making a big difference.

Forgot about it, I saw it once when I was checking some e-books but never bother reading into what you do with those credits


So they could simply transform those gifts into a somewhat close resemblance of crypto.
Not that it would matter if it's not decentralized, not minable, not irreversible, not anonymous, not, not, not...
I'm willing to bet that if they do offer it and create some kind of wallets app in which to store it and use them to buy on amazon they would easily sell a few billion worth and have at least a few millions installs in the first week.

Probably the best way to finance a company without issuing shares.

Starbucks (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/starbucks-has-more-customer-money-on-cards-than-many-banks-have-in-deposits-2016-06-09) is sitting on billions in form of unspent gift cards.