Bitcoin Climbs Over Speculation Amazon Will Accept It As Payment

Bitcoin’s price reached over $39,000 early Monday morning as speculation that Amazon may be looking to start accepting the cryptocurrency.

A crypto-related job ad posted on Amazon.com fuel the surge in Bitcoin price as it was seeking for an executive to develop its “digital currency and blockchain strategy,” as first reported by CoinDeck.

This spurred analysts to wonder whether the new hire could lead to Amazon accepting Bitcoin as payment on its e-commerce platform, Bloomberg said.

An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC that the company is “inspired by the innovation happening in the cryptocurrency space and are exploring what this could look like on Amazon.”

Following the news, Bitcoin was up over 11% to $38,456 as of early Monday morning, according to CoinDesk. Earlier in the day, prices came within a few hundred dollars of $40,000, Bloomberg reported.

Ethereum was up nearly 9%, while XRP was up over 10% as of 6:55 a.m. Dogecoin’s price was just over 14% at the same time.

According to a source for London’s City A.M. as reported by Business Insider, Amazon could start accepting Bitcoin by the ending of 2021 or earlier and has been working on the plans since 2019.

The price advance for Bitcoin and other currencies also came after positive comments from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood at the “The B Word” event last week.

At the Bitcoin-focused event, Musk announced that Tesla would be open to accepting the currency after halting the payment in May for inefficient energy use when mining for the currency. Mining for Bitcoin uses computers that solve complex math problems using large amounts of energy that is considered inefficient.

Dorsey also said that Bitcoin would also be a part of Twitter and Square’s future.

The increase also came after $940 million was wiped off the crypto market on Monday when a number of global stocks were sold, and later it was discovered that a cease-and-desist letter was sent from the New Jersey attorney general to crypto lending firm BlockFi, ordering to stop all interest-bearing accounts, Forbes said.