Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says Amazon is not close to adding support for cryptocurrency payments.
“We’re not probably close to adding crypto as a payment mechanism in our retail business, but I do believe over time that you’ll see crypto become bigger,” Jassy said.
But Jassy, who made the comments in a CNBC interview on Thursday, did say he thought it was "possible down the road" that Amazon could eventually sell NFTs.
Jassy’s crypto commentary comes amid recent speculation that Amazon might one day allow customers to pay using cryptocurrency.
Amazon and crypto
Last summer, the e-commerce giant said it was “exploring” cryptocurrency payments for the platform.
“We’re inspired by the innovation happening in the cryptocurrency space and are exploring what this could look like on Amazon,” read a company statement shared with Decrypt at the time.
We believe the future will be built on new technologies that enable modern, fast, and inexpensive payments, and hope to bring that future to Amazon customers as soon as possible.”
Amazon Web Services—the cloud platform subsidiary of Amazon—also advertised for a Head of Product to join its Amazon Managed Blockchain. The job opening indicated a preference for potential applicants experienced with the world of decentralized finance (DeFi).
In addition, Amazon’s Advertising FinTech team was last year searching for a Senior Software Engineer to work on “financial ledger, billing and reconciliation systems.” This particularly vacancy did not make explicit reference to crypto or blockchain technology, but the URL for the vacancy did.
Jassy himself has a history with blockchain, too.
He replaced Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO after serving as Amazon Web Services CEO, where he launched the cloud platform’s Amazon Managed Blockchain service.