Amazon Digital Marketplace
After much anticipation, Amazon has officially launched their Amazon Digital Marketplace. Customers of the e-commerce giant will be able to buy not only physical goods but also digital collectibles.
To kick off this new initiative, Amazon will offer 15 different NFT collections including the popular brands Bored Ape, Crypto Punks, and Mutant Ape.
While only Prime customers in the US currently have access to the NFT marketplace, we expect this offering to be available in other countries soon. Even more exciting, customers won’t need cryptocurrency wallets to purchase NFTs. All purchases can be made through an Amazon account with a credit card.
As Amazon’s Digital Marketplace expands, it seems likely that the draw of a global commerce giant like Amazon will almost singlehandedly kickstart the NFT market’s resurgence.
An unexpected turn
Until now, Amazon was not well known for its interest in cryptocurrency or blockchain. The only Web3-type program it had launched was Amazon Coins, which functioned less as a digital currency and more as a loyalty program.
That said, in the spring of 2022, Amazon CEO Andy Jesse hinted that NFTs would be sold on the marketplace in the future. He also emphasized that he expected “significant growth” in the non-interchangeable token sector.
What to expect
Amazon’s Digital Marketplace is still in the early stages of development and it’s hard to predict how successful it will be. By entering the market now, however, the company is positioning itself as one of the key players in the Web3 arena.
In fact, there’s a strong possibility that Amazon will soon surpass platforms like OpenSea to become the new global marketplace for NFT trading.
OpenSea might have a 1 million-strong user base, but that pales in comparison to a global giant like Amazon. With more than 150 million Prime subscribers in the US alone, the sheer size of Amazon could crush the NFT marketplace competition overnight.
Knowing the power and potential of Amazon, we can expect that its offerings will differ significantly from those of OpenSea.
But what those exact offerings will be remains to be seen. Will they be NFTs in business operations? NFTs linked to the sale of physical goods? Or something else?
The right place at the right time
The launch of Amazon’s NFT marketplace is one of the great markers of the NFT market’s gradual recovery following a disappointing end of 2022.
According to DappRadar, 2023 started with a sharp increase in both prices and the number of NFT units sold on marketplaces.
Trading volume in dollars also rose, reaching $946 million at the beginning of the year. This is the highest indicator since the marketplace peaked at $1 billion in June of last year.
Meanwhile, Amazon is not the first major corporation to develop its own NFT marketplace. Last summer, the e-commerce giant eBay bought KnownOrigin, a platform for trading non-exchangeable tokens.
At the end of May 2022, it reported the plans to release its own NFT collection but it never appeared. However, in mid-February, KnownOrigin opened the possibility for digital artists to receive royalties from the resale of virtual collections.
Whether Amazon will repeat the same path or become an NFT market leader is not yet known. But it is definitely something worth keeping an eye on.
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