The Asian Lesson
Across much of Asia, you’d struggle to find a business that happily accepts cards or Apple Pay without slapping on an extra fee. Merchants there bypassed pricey Visa/Mastercard rails years ago with cheap scan-and-pay QR systems, think WeChat Pay, Alipay, PromptPay, or QRIS. Often that means a 2–7% surcharge for cards because no one wants to eat those fees. In the West, we’ve mostly grumbled and paid up, stuck in the card-era stone age.
Amazon Fresh and the QR Seed
Amazon Fresh stores brought a taste of that frictionless future: scan a QR code from your Amazon app at the gate (or use a Dash Cart), grab what you want, and walk out, billed automatically. It didn’t scale due to the adoption curve and costly manual review, but with advances in AI we could see a revival of the Amazon Fresh technology. Announced literally days ago (17 November 2025), Project Prometheus is Bezos’ return to the CEO chair co-leading a $6.2 billion-funded AI startup focused on “AI for the physical economy”. Think massive multimodal models trained on real-world physics: engineering simulations, robotics, manufacturing, computers/aerospace/autos, the lot. It’s about agents that understand and interact with the 3D world (exactly the nightmare Just Walk Out has wrestled with since day one).
Amazon’s Firepower
Amazon already processes hundreds of billions in payments yearly and bleeds billions in card fees. They’ve got Amazon Pay, huge stored balances, over 200 million Prime loyalists worldwide, and a logistics empire that touches everything. AWS powers a hefty chunk of blockchain infrastructure (managed nodes for Ethereum, Avalanche, and more), giving them the tools to run a proper low-fee rail if they want.
The Stablecoin Dream
Imagine an Amazon-backed USD stablecoin. Rumours heated up after the Wall Street Journal reported in June 2025 that both Amazon and Walmart are actively exploring dollar-pegged coins to slash fees. Top up from your bank (Revolut-style), earn Prime perks or cashback, then spend via the same app QR, in Fresh stores, online, or at partners. Near-instant settlement, pennies in fees, Amazon keeps the float interest instead of banks. Tie it to Prime rewards and you’ve got a sticky loop: customers stay in the Amazon ecosystem, suppliers get paid faster, expats dodge brutal FX rates.
Blending scan-and-pay with a stablecoin could genuinely disrupt Western payments and give travellers a decent alternative in Asia. Circle’s USDC is pushing multi-trillion lifetime volumes, and a more crypto-friendly Washington, the door is ajar for big players to issue their own.
Amazon Fresh’s QR experiment has the pieces all there. A closed-loop, Prime-boosted “Amazon economy” isn’t sci-fi, it’s peak decentralisation and Amazon has the scale to become the West’s scan-and-pay solution overnight if they decide to push the button.