Amazon Riles Up Bitcoin Integration Rumors After Filling a Proof-Of-Work Based Patent

By Prashant Jha

Amazon, the trillion dollars largest online retail market place has recently filled for a crypto-based Proof-Of-Work (PoW) patent, which has rife up the rumor mills that the retail giants might be planning to integrate Bitcoin into its payment system.

2019 has seen many non-conventional ventures like Jaguar and Nike entering the crypto space, and Amazon even though has been rumored to be working on a blockchain project of its own, never really revealed their plans with the technology. Some rumors suggested that Amazon would be offering blockchain as a service to other clients, rather than implementing it in the current system.

The patent titled  “Generation of Merkle Trees as Proof-of-Work” was filed way back in December 2016, however, the news broke out very recently after Morgan Creek’s Anthony Pompliano broke the news. He tweeted,

“BREAKING: Amazon has filed a patent in the US for a proof-of-work system that leverages cryptography.”

However, the patent did not really reveal how Amazon intends to use the blockchain or crypto, neither did the patent talk about any token use. The patent only discusses a cryptography-based proof-of-work authentication system.

Apart from that, the patent mentions the use of technology to “purely mitigate any Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack” by using Proof-of-work based algorithm. The firm will be using the SHA-256 hashing algorithm for its system as the main component.

However, the rumors about Amazon integrating Bitcoin came from the patent itself which also mentions the use of Merkle Trees, the same has been used in Bitcoin and Ethereum in their peer-to-peer payment system. Thus, the mentions of Proof-of-work and Use of Merkle tree has convinced many in the crypto space that Amazon would be integrating crypto use in its system.

Amazon Web Services General Manager Rahul Pathak talked to reporters at Consensus 2019 and said that if digital assets are something that matters to the customers then Amazon would surely try to get a point of view that matters to the customers.