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On Jan 27th, Blockcworks a leading research and news provider in the crypto space wrote an exclusive article that amazon is planning to launch their own NFT market marketplace in April. Last year, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy hinted that he sees crypto getting bigger over time and that he could see the company selling NFTs "down the road" in a Squawkbox interview on CNBC. With lots of speculations circling in the past couple of days, we are looking at the possibility of Amazon launching a NFT marketplace this April.
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There is no official announcement yet. However, many leading crypto dailys such as coingape, bitcoininst and Benzinga, four to five inside sources have confirmed that NFT initiative is expected in the spring, likely in April. According to thebigwhale.io, the marketplace will be launched on April 24th to be exact.
Incidentally, there is a NFT explainer page in the amazon web service portal. Benzinga reported that the NFT marketplace will be called either “Amazon NFT Marketplace” or “Amazon Digital Marketplace” and will have 15 NFT collections available at the initial launch in the United States before expanding to other countries. These collections can be purchased using customer’s amazon accounts through any payment methods.
Amazon has been busy in the web3 space with multiple partnerships with leading blockchains and below is their list of partnerships so far.
In January, Amazon Web Services partnered with Ava Labs in a bid to accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology. Ava Labs is the company behind the leading layer-1 blockchain Avalanche with their token (AVAX). Following the announcement, AVAX Price rose by 26% briefly.
Amazon also has an integration with Chainlink (LINK) for node-creation solutions. According to chainlink ecosystem, “with this integration, node operators and data providers joining the Chainlink ecosystem can start connecting to blockchains within minutes or hours instead of weeks or months''
Amazon Web Services had also tied up with public blockchain VeChainThor (VET) for blockchain-based carbon management services.
All these tokens have seen a mild surge to their price in the past 24 hrs according to Coinmarketcap at the time of writing.
Few of the experts believe that, with its ownership of live-streaming gaming platform Twitch, Amazon could also be looking towards gaming themed NFT. On the other hand, as the owner of MGM, which includes a catalogue of video and television contents could become early test cases for launching new digital assets.
Although Amazon has not made any official announcement regarding its foray into the NFT marketplace, its entry in the space could become a significant game changer for the entire NFT industry. We are already seeing a monumental change in Opensea’s dominance as Blur (BLUR) is smashing all records by concentrating on pro traders and has put a stop to Opensea’s monopoly.
The NFT market has started to gain momentum again, after Yuga labs’s recent launch of Twelvefold collection through Bitcoin inscriptions that generated ₹135 Crores yesterday. Amazon’s entry could also be a use case study to see if it onboards more people to the Web3 space, as users will have the option of buying without any crypto assets and their entry could push the NFT markets into the next bull run.
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Disclaimer: This article was authored by Giottus Crypto Exchange as a part of a paid partnership with The News Minute. Crypto-asset or cryptocurrency investments are subject to market risks such as volatility and have no guaranteed returns. Please do your own research before investing and seek independent legal/financial advice if you are unsure about the investments.