Amazon holding back from blockchain

Blockchain is taking over the market and is extensively being used and researched in the technology world. It was initially developed for the digital currency, Bitcoin; it is now being used by the tech industry for numerous other purposes. Blockchain owes its success to two features:  transparency and incorruptibility.

Blockchain is recognized as the greatest development in the field of technology since the internet. However, just recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon, announced that it will not be introducing any blockchain related service just yet. AWS is well known player in the field of tech services, with the aims of providing technology set-ups in the form of web services to its clients.

Its CEO, Andy Jassy, made the announcement of AWS’s reluctance towards blockchain at the annual ‘re:Invent Conference 2017’ held in Las Vegas, Nevada, during November. Jassy justified this animosity by explaining that the functions of blockchains are currently very limited. In addition, Jassy stated that the company has not seen any major function of blockchains outside of using it as a distributed ledger as of now. According to him, most of the problems that blockchain enthusiasts claim to solve can already be solved by other technological strategies that the company is already using. He further stated that the company’s foremost objective is to provide its services to the clients in their best forms, saying, “we don’t build technology because we think the technology is cool, we only build it if we think we can solve a customer problem and building that service is the best way to solve it.”

AWS is not against blockchain, it believes that it is simply to early to enter into the blockchain market, as there are is not viable use of blockchain that would demand their immediate attention. However, Amazon's rivals have not wasted any time in establishing blockchain-based services and have been more enthusiastic towards this growing technology. Companies, such as Microsoft and IBM, have appeared to embrace this technology to the fullest. Microsoft Azure has launched Coco framework that enables high-scale blockchain network, capable of handling 1,600 transactions per second, also their Azure Blockchain services, which is in fact a BaaS (Blockchain-as-a-Service).

IBM has also launched its own BaaS, IBM Blockchain, which enables businesses to make speedy transactions with a secure ledger. IBM has also announced that they are partnering with ‘The Hyperledger Project’ in order to improve the cross-industry blockchain technology.

Will Amazon regret their decision to hold off on joining the blockchain bandwagon? Only time will tell.