What happened
On a modestly up day for tech stocks, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq up nearly 1 full percentage point as of 12:25 p.m. ET, shares of tech giant Amazon (AMZN -1.14%) are doing better than most -- rising a solid 3%. It would seem they're doing so for a very "techie" reason: non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
So what
An Amazon NFT initiative is coming soon, said crypto news source Blockworks in a report late yesterday afternoon. As early as April, the e-commerce giant could begin selling digital collectibles on its website, and offering its customers the opportunity to play crypto games, with the potential to win free NFTs as prizes.
Amazon isn't commenting on Blockworks' report, but this sounds like a logical move for the company. Ever since Amazon -- which began its life as a bookseller -- invented the Kindle e-reader to sell digital books in 2007, it's been clear the company appreciated the advantage of selling virtual goods: Money comes in with each product sale, while very little money goes out to deliver those products. The company's Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Games divisions operate on the same logic, and helped to create the profits behemoth that is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Now what
With all this infrastructure already in place, it seems to me that leveraging AWS to create and sell NFTs should be a pretty low-cost, low-risk project for the tech giant. It remains to be seen, of course, whether selling NFTs will also be a high-reward business.
Quoting one source, Blockworks predicts that Amazon could make "a huge splash in the NFT marketplace" -- and that may be true. Still, consider that Amazon's share price gain today has boosted its market capitalization by more than $30 billion already.
Splashes notwithstanding, Amazon's going to have to sell an awful lot of NFTs to justify that increase in the cost of its shares.
