Amazon may soon become the latest Fortune 500 company to venture into NFTs. As reported today by blocks, the e-commerce giant plans to launch a “digital asset company,” in other words, an NFT initiative, this spring. According to an anonymous source the post spoke to, the company’s focus will be on blockchain-based games that reward players with NFTs.
According to the report, the platform will reportedly run out of Amazon in the face of Amazon Web Services (AWS), but it’s still unclear who is leading the charge in terms of staffing.
This news comes immediately after Recent AWS Partnership with Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain. In a press release issued at the time, the teams noted that Ava Labs plans to add subnetting deployment as a managed service to the AWS Marketplace, allowing people to launch custom subnets with just a few clicks. “It has been a great help for individual and enterprise developers to be able to activate nodes and test networks on the fly with AWS in whatever legal jurisdiction makes the most sense for them,” Emin Gün Sirer, founder and CEO of Ava Labs, said in a statement.
To this end, this latest NFT news is just Amazon’s latest step into the world of Web3, a step many saw coming.
In a Squawkbox interview on CNBC In April 2022, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, stated that he believed the company would one day sell NFTs. “I expect NFTs to continue to grow very significantly. We are probably not close to adding cryptocurrency as a payment mechanism in our retail business, but I think over time you will see cryptocurrency get bigger,” he said at the time. When asked if he could see Amazon selling NFTs, Jessy replied, “Yeah, I think it’s in the future.”
This latest plan is likely to be a further evolution of previously rumored efforts for Amazon to collaborate with established Web3 native artists. Previously, Amazon had gotten involved in the NFT space through a series called NFTMewhich explores NFT culture and disruption around the world.
While little is known about Amazon’s upcoming foray into NFTs other than what anonymous sources relayed to blocksthe company will likely share more information with the public in the coming months, as April appears to be the tentative launch date for these current efforts, according to the report.
This story was developing and was updated.