Shopping on Amazon just got a whole lot easier if you’re a cryptocurrency fan. Two startups are joining hands to allow customers to pay for Amazon purchases with ether tokens.
Amazon and Crypto: The New Norm?
As of late, the idea of using crypto to pay for goods and services is gaining lots of traction in the monetary arena. Recently, we’ve discussed enterprises like Flexa, which are partnering up with several retailers including Jamba Juice, Nordstrom and Whole Foods to allow customers to pay for items with digital assets, but there’s a serious mark to be made through Amazon.
Arguably the biggest online retailer in the world, if crypto payments suddenly become the norm on its website, one can expect crypto to become not only a legit means of payment, but prices of various coins are likely to explode in the coming years.
To be fair, it’s always been crypto’s primary goal to be used as a means of payment. That’s what digital assets were originally designed for but making this goal a reality has been difficult given the volatility and price swings that crypto is often vulnerable to. If you pay for $50 worth of merchandise with crypto, there’s always a chance that that money will suddenly be worth $40 the next day.
You still walk away with the items you purchased, but the retailer initiating the sale has now lost ten dollars. It’s not entirely fair to the merchant, and thus price swings have gotten in the way and prevented several stores from accepting crypto as payment.
However, things appear to be changing, and they’re changing fast. This could potentially be due to the sudden bullish activity being exhibited by bitcoin and its crypto-cousins, though it’s hard to say for sure.
In the meantime, Amazon’s ether acceptance is being made possible through the efforts of two startups: crypto payments firm CLIC Technology and blockchain infrastructure provider and B2B platform Opporty. Both are working to build a browser extension that will allow individuals to pay for Amazon items with ether.
A press release explains:
Traditional Ethereum-based platforms are made to handle, on average, about 20 transactions per second, far less than what is needed for a functioning financial ecosystem. By comparison, Amazon processes upwards of 300 transactions per second, typically making it incompatible with the digital currency, but with Opporty’s Plasma Cash, CLIC Technology can now dramatically accelerate transaction speeds while reducing loads on the system. It can process a significantly larger number of transactions per second, potentially exceeding those of Visa and Mastercard.
Two Crypto Masters Working Together
CLIC Technology CEO Roman Bond added to the statement, claiming:
Bringing cryptocurrency to the e-commerce marketplace is the merging of two next-generation industries. We’re excited to be working on this project with Opporty.
