An Amazon job posting has led to a chain reaction that has resulted in the biggest Bitcoin surge in the past month.
According to the BBC, Amazon’s corporate website recently posted a job that was in search of “a digital currency and blockchain product lead.” The job description involved observing how customers of the shipping giant pay for their goods.
This led to speculation that cryptocurrency would soon be accepted as a form of payment on the site. And this speculation was further fueled by a tip leaked by an anonymous source to the British newspaper City A.M.
“This isn’t just going through the motions to set up cryptocurrency payment solutions at some point in the future—this is a full-on, well-discussed, integral part of the future mechanism of how Amazon will work,” the source said to the outlet.
The source also said that Bitcoin would be the first cryptocurrency to be accepted on the platform, and that other cryptocurrency denominations — including Ethereum, Cardano, and “Bitcoin Cash” — would soon follow. What’s more, the source said that this had been in the works since 2019, and that it “wouldn’t be long” before Amazon began the rollout of crypto acceptance.
This speculation has had quite an effect on the price of Bitcoin. According to Yahoo Finance, Bitcoin was up 12 percent to $38,723 (£28,169) just after 8 a.m. on Monday morning in London. That’s the highest price of the cryptocurrency in over a month.
But in a statement to Yahoo Finance, a spokesperson for Amazon stopped just short of confirming that the platform would accept cryptocurrency as payment, though they seemed enthusiastic about the possibility in the future.
“We’re inspired by the innovation happening in the cryptocurrency space and are exploring what this could look like on Amazon,” the statement read. “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.”
