Walmart Publishes Crypto Developer Job

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Walmart Inc. is following Amazon.com’s lead by hiring someone to develop cryptocurrency payment options for online shoppers.

The retailer this week posted a job posting for a senior manager responsible for leading digital currency and cryptocurrency product development.

The list was available on Walmart’s careers webpage on Monday, but appeared to have been taken down on Wednesday. Walmart did not immediately respond to two requests for more information about the work and its plans for developing and using cryptocurrency products.

The successful candidate, who will work at Walmart’s head office in Bentonville, must be “a visionary leader who is used to leading and growing businesses,” the job posting said.

“As one of the largest retailers and e-commerce companies, Walmart offers a wide range of payment options to its customers,” according to the job description. The “Digital Currency / Cryptocurrency Manager” will be responsible for developing the digital currency strategy and product “roadmap”. Expertise in digital currency / cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies is also required.

Walmart’s job posting uses almost the same wording as Amazon’s, which was posted on July 26.

Amazon’s post states, “As one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, Amazon processes billions of secure online transactions through numerous payment methods and capabilities across the globe.”

“The Payment Acceptance and Experience team is looking for an experienced Product Manager to develop Amazon’s digital currency and blockchain strategy and product roadmap,” Amazon said in the offering of use.

Amazon told Reuters and other news outlets that it does not have specific plans for the use of cryptocurrencies, but admitted its “interest in the space.”

Cryptocurrency is, quite simply, a form of digital money, said Kathryn Gadberry Carlisle, senior executive director of the University of Arkansas Blockchain Center of Excellence at Sam M. Walton College of Business.

A whole new online model for money, cryptocurrency “has all the traditional behind-the-scenes banking and payment processing systems algorithmically encoded into software,” she said. “Then this software is managed and upgraded by a worldwide network of computers operating independently to verify and share this financial information.”

Gadberry Carlisle said the cryptocurrency was created by an anonymous person or group of people who disclosed it in an online discussion board in 2009. Since then, it has evolved into different versions, known as altcoins.

Bitcoin is the most well-known cryptocurrency, she said.

One advantage of using cryptocurrency is that it enables peer-to-peer payments, said Gadberry Carlisle. These “are faster, cheaper, more secure and more inclusive” than traditional, centralized models for the money, she said.

“Your bank, your credit card company, your sovereign government – these are the institutions that inefficiently and abusively control how each of us… interacts with money,” she said.

“Decentralized cryptocurrencies are the future of money and the start of a fairer financial economy,” she said.

Cryptocurrencies are enabled by an emerging technology called blockchain, Gadberry Carlisle said. Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized database shared with a network of partners who interact with the blockchain, she said.

“Distributed” in this context means that information on the blockchain is shared and distributed among computers called nodes, said Gadberry Carlisle. “Decentralized” refers to the computing nodes that operate the system itself by processing, verifying and securing information – not just storing it.

Cryptocurrency was the first application built on a blockchain, she said. However, the blockchain has many other uses.

“Anything that can typically require information saved and verified in a table or database has the option of being written to a blockchain,” said Gadberry Carlisle.

Grand View Research Inc. said in a March report that the global blockchain technology market is expected to reach $ 394.6 billion by 2028. The research firm attributes this trend to the growing number of traders accepting cryptocurrency for payment as well as the growing interest of financial institutions in blockchain technology.

Besides retail, according to the report, blockchain has potential in other sectors such as finance, healthcare, telecommunications, and transportation.

Walmart is requiring its suppliers of green leafy products to use blockchain as part of the Food Traceability Initiative launched in 2018. Suppliers enter their product tracking information into IBM’s Food Trust network.

This blockchain-enabled ledger dramatically speeds up the process of identifying the source of any food-related disease outbreak.

Walmart said in its press release on the Food Traceability Initiative that blockchain is considered a transparent form of record keeping. This transparency makes it extremely difficult to falsify information, the retailer said.

While the information entered is visible to everyone in the blockchain network, any attempt to alter records is also clearly evident, Walmart said.

The Blockchain Center of Excellence holds free lectures and other events for the public throughout the year, Gadberry Carlisle said. She and her colleagues Mary Lacity and Daniel Conway founded the center within the Information Systems Department at Walton College in 2018.

The centre’s executive advisory board includes Northwest Arkansas companies Walmart, Tyson Foods Inc., JB Hunt Transport Services Inc. and ArcBest, as well as IBM, Microsoft, FedEx and Accenture.

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