Amazon has been talking about cryptocurrencies for quite some time, and now the company has taken serious steps towards their goal of integrating cryptocurrencies and blockchain in their business.
Amazon just won its first Bitcoin patent, which grants them the exclusive permission to run a streaming data marketplace. The marketplace will allow all users to track cryptocurrency transactions instantly and at all times.
The patent is actually granted to one of Amazon’s subsidiaries – Amazon Technologies. The patent itself will be used to create a special marketplace where users will be able to data feeds for sale, and the whole process will be executed through subscription.
According to BTCManager, the filing of the patent suggests that developers could “build real-time dashboards, capture exceptions and generate alerts, drive recommendations, and make other real-time business or operational decisions.”
The new application will be of use to developers who want to execute on financial information, marketing data, social media data etc. However, the particular interest is towards cryptocurrencies since the system will allow users to view their cryptocurrency transactions in real time and on the spot.
The patent states that previously the ability to view transactions may be of “low latency value”:
“Streaming analytics technologies hold the promise of making vast volumes of data available in a low latency fashion. However, while prior technologies may be able to provide data in a low latency fashion, the raw data may have low value (or have less valuable than the data could have) until the raw data is enhanced by correlating the raw data with additional data, such as by matching records using common values.”
However, the value of the new marketplace will come from the combination of many sources and thus, value added is higher. The patent describes how Bitcoin-tracking may be enhanced using several data streams:
“…a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream”.