Amazon bitcoin payments / Steve Jobs NFT / Binance leverage

Plus, Tether investigation probe by the DOJ

Inside.com Part of   Network July 26, 2021

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Amazon denied a claim that the company could begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment as early as this year. London newspaper City A.M. said its source claimed the decision comes directly from high-ranking Amazon executives and potentially Jeff Bezos himself. More: There still may be validity to the claims as the company did maintain that it will "will continue exploring cryptocurrency." The source additionally said Amazon's bitcoin acceptance would only be the beginning of its blockchain ambitions. The e-commerce giant could accept other cryptocurrencies and may even develop a cryptocurrency of its own as early as 2022. Amazon has been developing a secure way to accept cryptocurrency since 2019. In related news: Last week, Amazon posted an opening on its job board for a "digital currency and blockchain product lead" to work with their payments acceptance and experience team. Earlier this year, the company posted an opening for a position to work on a digital and emerging payments project that will launch in Mexico and allow locals to buy crypto with cash. In May, Apple posted a job for an alternative payment business development associate that mentions experience with digital wallets and cryptocurrency as a requirement. Zoom out: Amazon has 147 million Amazon Prime members in the U.S alone and they spend over $1,000 per year on average. Amazon processes over 66,000 transactions per day. Additional publically traded companies involved with bitcoin: Paypal Square  Tesla Microstrategy Visa JP Morgan

Steve Jobs' 1973 handwritten job application is up for auction as an NFT. The physical and NFT versions of the application are for sale in the auction organized by London-based entrepreneur Olly Joshi. More: At press time, the highest bid for the physical version is $120,000, while the highest bid for the NFT is 1 ETH (~$2,400). The auction is working with Rarible to sell the NFT and Snoofa to sell the physical version. The position or company Jobs applied to is unknown, and the 1973 date places it three years before he started Apple. The auction ends at 5 pm EDT this Wednesday.

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Shopify announced Monday that it will begin allowing merchants to sell NFTs directly through their platform. Shopify users were previously required to rely on third parties like Rarible and OpenSea to sell their NFTs. More: The NBA's Chicago Bulls are one of the first users to offer NFTs through the platform and will be selling their "Legacy Collection"  July 26-31. According to Shopify's president, the capacity to sell NFTs via the Shopify platform will only be available to select customers for now. Shopify will be working with Sweet, a leading enterprise NFT distribution platform, to integrate NFT sales into their ecosystem Shopify joins eBay, which announced its own NFT selling integration in May.

The U.S DOJ is investigating executives at Tether over an incident of bank fraud potentially committed years ago. The primary point of the investigation is to determine if Tether hid the fact that its transactions were linked to crypto from banks. More: Tether released a blog post in response to the Bloomberg article covering the investigation, calling out a perceived pattern of news meant to discredit the cryptocurrency. Tether underlies over half of all bitcoin transactions. The leading stablecoin has been the subject of federal officials since 2018. There is ~$62B worth of Tether in circulation.

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Binance announced that it will trim down its maximum leverage allowance to 20x. The platform, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, previously offered users a maximum of 100x leverage, which until now was largely the standard across most exchanges. More: Binance is joining their fellow exchange FTX, which on Sunday, announced its own plans to cut its leverage limit to 20x. Many attribute May's market-wide sell-off to the liquidation of over-leveraged long positions. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said he believes that leverage amplifies the crypto market's volatility. FTX's CEO, Sam Bankman-Freid, disagreed with that notion in a recent tweet, where he espoused his views that high leverage makes up a small portion of all positions and that leverage, in general, does not largely contribute to enhanced volatility.  The exact reasoning for the reduction in leverage was not disclosed other than CZ's comments that it was "in the interest of consumer protection."

QUICK HITS  This fintech startup answered 9 of the most common questions employees have about startup stock options.* The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg will auction NFTs of five of its most famous masterpieces in August on the Binance NFT marketplace. The number of crypto ATMs that have been installed worldwide has increased over 70% to 24,030 this year. Tesla's Q2 earnings call revealed that the company still holds $1.3B in bitcoin. Bitcoin hit a daily wick above $40,000 for the first time since mid-June. * This is sponsored content.

Trevor is a business researcher at Inside and holds a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering. He writes on a wide range of topics in the business and tech stratosphere with specific interests presently being cryptocurrency and electric vehicles.  Connect with him on Twitter @trevorisonline Editor Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 Ford.

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