How FlyCoin is Changing the Game — Ownership (The Paradigm Shift: Equity not Debt)

One of our core intents creating Flycoin was our desire to have customers be “owners” of the loyalty program. For that matter, for all participants in the ecosystem to be co-owners of the ecosystem. Coincidentally, ownership, authenticated ownership, and distributed ownership are core attributes of Web3*.

Legacy loyalty programs are predominantly owned by merchants who print loyalty punch-cards or their digital version — points. Punch cards and points are only redeemable for what the merchant says it’s redeemable for and only with that merchant, as long as that merchant is around or still honoring the points. It’s a debt-based system where the merchant is promising you a future discount.

With Flycoin, when a participating organization gives a reward to one of their members, they are giving a digital asset that has an external value (it’s not a promise for future redemption, it can be redeemed for other assets or for fiat, immediately), actually they are transferring ownership of that asset (verifiable on publicly auditable blockchains) to the member. And therefore, the recipient becomes a co-owner of the ecosystem.

As an additional step Flycoin rewards the participating organization with FLY for themselves to hold, so that they grow in their co-ownership of the ecosystem as well. This co-ownership throughout the ecosystem aligns everyone’s interests to want to see the ecosystem grow and become more open as that increases the value of the FLY that they hold. Because FLY is a limited asset, the larger the ecosystem and the more FLY is used, the more valuable FLY becomes.

Additionally, merchants and organizations that become a Flycoin partner organization are automatically integrated into a world-wide alliance of participating organizations (and consumers). No further bilateral/multilateral agreements to ink and additional multi-organizational technology or systems integrations necessary — automatic inclusion into a world-wide network.

You can’t do that with punch cards or points.

What does the world look like when ownership is shared by consumers, businesses, intermediaries, and the entire ecosystem? Let’s explore that in “Part 2: The FlyCoin World Order — Loyalty in a Crypto-Powered World.”

In the meantime, what are your thoughts and insights on the implications of a crypto-powered loyalty ecosystem? Share in the comments!

*https://ethereum.org/en/web3/

Originally published at https://medium.com on October 10, 2022.