Yesterday as part of the New York Times DealBook Summit, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company doesn’t have immediate plans for using cryptocurrencies for payments. However, he said, “there are other things we are definitely looking at.” But he wouldn’t be drawn on specifics.
What might that be? We decided to mix some educated guessing with a bit of speculation. Since its founding, Apple has targeted creatives with the original Mac adopted by design companies, while mainstream businesses used Windows.
And non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are most certainly a tool for creatives. So if Apple doesn’t have immediate plans for payments, NFTs must be the likely candidate. We came up with four speculative ideas. Firstly is the ability to have an NFT of an iTunes track.
Secondly, to store NFTs in your wallet. After all, you might already use the wallet for your flight tickets. Why not NFT tickets or any NFTs, for that matter?
Next is to support NFTs in games in the appstore. And finally, creating an NFT store within the appstore. So creatives can issue, sell and re-sell their NFTs.
What do you think?
Asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin whether Apple might support cryptocurrency as part of Apple Pay, Tim Cook responded, “It’s something that we’re looking at. It’s not something we have immediate plans to do.” He added that Apple is not planning to accept cryptocurrencies for payments in the near future.
He ruled out using Apple’s treasury balance to invest in cryptocurrency, “because I don’t think people buy an Apple stock to get exposure to crypto. If they want to do that, they can invest directly in crypto.” However, he said he owned some himself.
