A survey of a thousand Amazon shoppers revealed that more than half of them want an Amazon cryptocurrency. According to a survey by LendEDU – an online marketplace for student loan refinancing – 51.7% of the respondents answered “Yes” to the question: “If offered, would you be open to the idea of using an Amazon-created crypto-currency (ex. Amazon Coin) for future purchases on Amazon.com?” The LendEDU website similarly showed that 58.27% of Amazon Prime users also want to see Amazon create its own cryptocurrency. The survey also revealed that only one in five people disliked the idea.
The 1,000 respondents asked by LendEDU made a purchase from the Amazon website in the last thirty days. Besides cryptocurrency, respondents were similarly asked about car and life insurance, Amazon health, Amazon mortgages, Amazon bank accounts, Amazon investment products, loans, and Amazon robo-advisers.
Currently, Amazon does not accept digital currency payments. In 2013, the company purchased the domain name amazonbitcoin.com- a site that leads users to Amazon’s home page. In November 2017, Amazon registered domain names amazonethereum.com, amazoncryptocurrencies.com, as well as amazoncryptocurrency.com. Amazon claims that it registered the domains in order to protect its brand name. Amazon’s own Amazon Coins are not digital coins but vouchers which users can spend on games and Kindle Fire apps. These coins are not transferable and cannot be resold.
ValueWalk.com reporter Maj Soueidan believes that Amazon creating its own cryptocurrency is possible given the company’s vast resources. Soueidan explains, “..the managing of exchanges is would be an extremely synergistic enterprise for Amazon as not only do they already have the massive computing power necessary to run their own exchanges and potentially mine for cryptocurrency themselves, but they are already one of the world’s largest marketplaces and the addition of cryptocurrencies to their arsenal would likely be a self-fulfilling prophecy that helps bolster the value of the cryptos that they would be transacting in. Using all of their resources to run a cryptocurrency exchange could be one of the best new runways for revenue growth that Amazon could possibly enter into at this stage in the game.” According to kwfinder.com, the keywords “Amazon bitcoin” has been searched online 18,000 times each month.
