"There are several reasons why launching such a new exchange medium may be to Amazon's advantage. At the very least, it poses a new, more centralized challenge to the popular virtual currency du jour, Bitcoin."
Sorry, haven't seen this and the older developer announcements.
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5698681" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5698681</a>