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Amazon Executive Squashes Crypto Rumors, Says Retail Giant Doesn’t Deal in the Speculative

June 21, 2019

Amazon does not have any immediate plans to develop its own digital currency, according to a company executive.

Patrick Gauthier, the vice president of Amazon Pay, told an audience at Fortune‘s Brainstorm 2019 that his company won’t be imitating Facebook’s upcoming Libra cryptocurrency.

“At Amazon we deal with data a lot, so I’ll be happy to have that conversation two to three years from now. I think right now we deal on the type of customer needs we can solve in the now.”

Gauthier says that above all, Amazon is focused on technologies it firmly understands.

“On the question of Libra, I think it’s fresh. It’s speculative. At Amazon, we deal not really in the speculative but in the now. So I don’t really have a lot to add on this. I think you point out something really important, which is trust in the Amazon brand. This is something we take super, super seriously.

We consider the trust of our customers as the most important asset that we have. We value it and we nurture it every day. Part of the nurturing the trust of those customers means that we always start from an identified need that we think we can really understand and that we have capabilities to solve. So the fact that we can build something does not mean that we should.”

Behind the scenes, Amazon does have a record of wading into blockchain technology which powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

Just last month, Amazon was granted a new patent that outlines a number of ways to create proof-of-work cryptographic systems, though the document did not go into specifics on how the systems would be used.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use the proof-of-work algorithm to verify transactions.

Amazon also owns amazonbitcoin.com, which redirects to the company’s official website, and Amazon Web Services has sunk significant investment into creating a suite of blockchain products and solutions.

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