Yahoo News Which will be the next major company to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet?
After major companies like MicroStrategy, Tesla, Galaxy Digital Holdings and Square doubled down on Bitcoin, many are wondering who could be next?
Companies that are operating in the social media sector, e-commerce or are simply tech-driven are more likely to offer crypto-related products and services and are more probable candidates for Bitcoin purchasing.
First and foremost, there is Twitter, whose new CEO – Parag Agrawal – said people should expect this social network “to move a lot faster than it has in the past”.
It’s no secret that Twitter’s latest boss, currently CEO of Block – Jack Dorsey – is a huge Bitcoin advocate.
He recently commented that if he wasn’t CEO of both Twitter and Square (now known as ‘Block’), that he would be working on Bitcoin.
It seems, he’s also putting that rhetoric into action, as he recently laid the groundwork and issued a white paper for Square to launch its own decentralised exchange for Bitcoin trading and enabled Bitcoin payments via Square/Block’s Cash App since 2018.
In October, Square announced that it would buy $50mn worth of Bitcoin, equating to 4,709 Bitcoins at the time.
In February, Twitter’s chief financial officer Ned Segal confirmed the company was considering the option of holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet.
With that said, it would not be unexpected to hear an announcement that Twitter has purchased Bitcoin.
Amazon
Amazon recently posted jobs for a digital currency project for a new division called Digital and Emerging Payments.
One of the postings said the company was looking for a leader to help us launch a new payment product starting with Mexico as our initial launch country.
“This product will enable customers to convert their cash into digital currency which customers can enjoy online services including shopping for goods and/or services like Prime Video,” the job ad said.
After its CEO Jeff Bezos was replaced by Andy Jassy, previous head of Amazon Web Services, Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Managed Blockchain, which claims to be the leading cloud provider of blockchain services, supporting all major protocols and hosting 25% of all Ethereum nodes worldwide.
It is expected that Jassy’s experience with blockchain could allow him to be more open to the company’s acceptance of crypto payments.
Google has the potential to become more involved with crypto mostly because of its Google Pay service, which seems primed for crypto integration.
Users can already use BitPay’s card for their crypto assets through Google’s payment app, but adding the ability for users to buy, hold and spend crypto directly in the app seems like an obvious choice in a world where crypto adoption has been growing.
Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, has also shared a positive outlook on the blockchain space and confirmed he owns an ‘ETH miner’.
“A year or two ago my son insisted that we needed to get a gaming PC. I told him If we get a gaming PC we have to mine cryptocurrency. So we got an Ethereum miner on there and we’ve been making a few pennies and dollars since,” he said.
“That definitely got me interested and I started to study the technology behind it and found it to be fascinating.”
Facebook has two board members that are well-known pro-Bitcoiners – Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen.
Its stablecoin, Diem, is still, however, set to launch a pilot.
As the company slowly movies into the crypto scene and establishes itself with its stablecoin and digital wallet systems, it could become more realistic for it to hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet as well.
Also, its founder Mark Zuckerberg recently posted a picture to his Facebook page of his goats named Max and Bitcoin. Amusing as that may be, it has led to a good deal of speculation among the crypto community.
Mastercard
In early February, Mastercard announced it would soon start supporting cryptocurrencies directly on its network.
“We are preparing right now for the future of crypto and payments, announcing that this year Mastercard will start supporting select cryptocurrencies directly on our network. This is a big change that will require a lot of work,” the company said.
Mastercard is also working with the Gemini Exchange to offer a crypto rewards credit card and has also partnered with Bakkt.
“We want to offer all of our partners the ability to more easily add crypto services to whatever it is they’re doing,” Sherri Haymond, Mastercard’s executive vice president of digital partnerships, then said.
