CEO Says eBay Is Looking at Cryptocurrency and NFTs

It’s quite hard to assume that anyone reading this blog has never heard of eBay, as it happens to be one of the largest e-commerce brands in the World. So whatever they do is either substantiated by rigorous research or they aim to instill a trend in their clientele and this is exactly what they have done this time as well by opting to sell NFTs on the platform.

While they have been entertaining the selling of physical artwork for several years now, this is a new breakthrough and it is happening at the perfect time when the crypto frenzy and institutional adoption are all over the news and people trust cryptocurrencies more than any other time in history.

If you are new to the space of NFTs, please note that with the recent feasibility offered by eBay, as an end-user, you would be able to sell or purchase a physical artwork of Elon Musk holding Bitcoin or you could even get a digital representation of the same image as well (aka NFT) while paying with crypto, or any other method entertained by eBay to support the functionality. Once you have bought an NFT, it would map to a particular artwork and will always belong to you.

Therefore, there can never be a theft associated with what you own. Even if we consider an edge case and it happens, you would always be able to claim the ownership in front of the public as the blockchain never lies!

Since this feasibility is rather new for eBay, they are quite keen to cultivate a reliable environment around the offering and therefore, the NFTs would only be listed on the platform by trusted sellers and are not available in all categories. Currently, they would only entertain cards, music, entertainment, and art, which are some of the easiest and most common forms to deal with.

For eBay, this appears to be a pilot project for entering the densely growing crypto market as they mentioned that “We are always looking at the most relevant forms of payment and will continue to assess that going forward. We have no immediate plans, but it (cryptocurrency) is something we are keeping an eye on”

So, if they pull this off in the right away and the public appreciates as well, they are most likely to:

• Introduce more crypto-friendly policy at the company level
• Extend the reach of NFTs to a wider array of products
• Allow more groups of users to list NFTs

It should also be noted that eBay has started exploring multiple options to stay interesting for the end-users and bring more use cases onboard as the company had a very weak financial forecast for the second quarter of 2021. Therefore, they are going to try new things and increase the profits by any means.