Amazon Coin? Amazon says anything is possible

Facebook Coin, meet Amazon Coin? That’s a big maybe according to Amazon Web Services.

The tech giant is using its own blockchain technology internally. When asked whether the company would extend its reach beyond blockchain and veer into cryptocurrency—will there ever be an Amazon Coin, perhaps? Or bitcoin payments integrated with Amazon.com?—Amazon Web Services General Manager Rahul Pathak, speaking at Consensus, appeared open to it.

“If it’s something that matters to customers, we'll find a way to have a point of view of it that makes more sense,” he said.

WOW!

Amazon currently offers an Amazon Quantum Database to enterprise customers, which essentially defers management of the ledger to a “trusted authority:” Amazon. He said the company was trialling it internally for multiple use cases.

“At our scale, in our e-commerce business and in  our web services business, we’ve had a need to maintain an immutable record,” he said. “So that core ledger component is something Amazon’s been using extensively and on a very high scale.”

Pressed for specifics, Pathak cited supply chain management as one of the ways Amazon has been using the technology.  

Delightful.