Walmart CTO says crypto will be a “major” payments disruptor
Walmart’s global chief technology officer (CTO) Suresh Kumar has tipped cryptocurrency to be a “huge” area of disruption, particularly in how customers pay for virtual and physical goods in the future.
Speaking at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit on October 17, Kumar outlined Walmart’s positive stance on digital assets, noting that “crypto will become an important part of how customers shop” for both physical and virtual goods.
“I think there are three big areas of disruption. Crypto kind of falls in the middle of that,” he said, explaining that “the way customers are inspired and discover products” is changing.
Kumar also suggested that a significant amount of customers will be marketed to through Metaverse and live streams on social media apps, and that crypto could be an important payment option in such areas.
“When you’re talking about crypto specifically, it’s going to be about product discovery, whether it’s physical or virtual inside, whether Metaverse or upfront, and then how people trade.”
This may explain Walmart’s recent foray into the Roblox Metaverse, launching Walmart Land in late September. The company hosts a variety of virtual experiences there such as games, a DJ booth and Ferris wheel, while offering virtual merchandise products called “verch” for users’ avatars.
NFTs and crypto are not integrated with the Roblox metaverse at this stage, but Walmart has previously indicated in patent filings from January that it may look to create digital currencies, tokens and NFTs in the Metaverse space sometime in the future.
“We want to make sure that we make it as frictionless for customers to be able to shop, and to be able to buy, and how they’re able to get value out of that. And that’s where — I think a lot of the disruption is going to to start happening in terms of different payment methods, different payment options,” he said.
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The multinational retail giant has been rumored to be working on rolling out support for crypto payments for some time, but so far only false alarms have arisen such as the fake Litecoin (LTC) deal announced via a dubious press release last September. year.
As it stands, there were around 200 Bitcoin (BTC) ATMs installed in Walmart stores across the US as of October 2021, with plans at the time to expand that number to 8,000 at an unspecified point in the future.
