Rewards Reimagined for the Decentralized Web
Decentralization means changing the way we transact and do business. The most successful companies in the Web3 space are those which have embraced this shift and which have created entirely new business models, rather than those that simply want to carry on with business as usual, with a blockchain bolted on.
However, this is not to say that we should discard everything we have learned and start from an entirely blank slate. There is plenty in TradFi and conventional commerce that we can learn from, and there are certain principles that will always hold true.
One of these principles is that customer loyalty is hugely important and the right behaviors should be rewarded.
Mastercard, VISA and Amex spend billions of dollars a year on loyalty programs. They do not do this mindlessly — rewards are a powerful force in retaining customers and a mechanism that encourages them to spend more. Rewards reinforce behavior. These programs offer product differentiation and can give customers experiences and a sense of exclusivity that matters far more than the pure monetary value of these rewards.
To put it simply, consider the alternatives for these companies if they did not use rewards programs. Customers would make a simple evaluation between competitors based on their fees and costs. Once you are in this territory, retaining customers becomes fraught with difficulty: modern technology has reduced the friction involved in changing suppliers or card providers to the point where there is no barrier to switching — and the only product differentiation is financial. Such undifferentiated products must compete on fees, which is an expensive race to the bottom.
Crypto exchanges and other companies in the Web3 space face a similar problem. Once certain criteria have been met — security, liquidity, technical competence — there is nothing driving consumer loyalty other than competition to offer low trading fees, to use one example. There is a reason why affiliate programs in crypto are so popular: we are not talking about one-off purchases. Instead, the revenue over the lifetime of a customer relationship can be considerable, and companies put a lot of effort into acquiring and nurturing such relationships.
Yet existing rewards programs are a poor fit for crypto businesses. Legacy proprietary platforms mean suppliers are locked-in with no interoperability. Customers have zero control over their rewards which can be revoked by suppliers, and this is an unacceptable situation for a crypto-literate audience who are used to holding self-custodied, entirely portable assets that can be freely traded and not withdrawn or changed once issued.
Today we’re proud to announce details about the first crypto native rewards platform powered by Boson Protocol: NiftyKey.
Boson Protocol and NiftyKey (built on Boson) enable crypto/Web3 users to trustlessly redeem real-world rewards, thus providing crypto brands with a bespoke differentiation tool.
Imagine a crypto credit card that wants to reward its users with the chance to win an NFT Art piece, or an exchange that rewards its top affiliates with an invitation to a dinner with some of the top names in digital assets. It is these unique experiences that are the drivers of a new type of relationship between companies and customers that is not based on paying the lowest possible price for something. Everyone wins in this scenario: the customer has non-custodial access to something unique, and the provider is able to differentiate themselves from their competitors at a lower cost, because the monetary value of the reward is less than its perceived value to the recipient.
Crypto native rewards can lower acquisition costs and boost engagement (and CLV) of a wide variety of crypto businesses.
The unique value proposition of Boson Protocol means that all kinds of new possibilities are revealed: a physical item can be just as easily tokenized, issued as a reward and redeemed in the real-world as the examples listed above. Hence instead of a digital ticket to an event or a purely digital NFT, a reward could be an NFT Art accompanied by its physical twin, or even a real-world product or service. NiftyKey (a crypto rewards platform powered by Boson Protocol) offers customers a wallet in which purely digital, digital-physical or purely physical assets can be held and transferred in an entirely interoperable, cross-platform way.
Of course, as Web3 continues to eat the world, the benefits that are demanded by the new breed of crypto-native customers will become the standard elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with legacy rewards programs as an idea — as stated at the beginning of this post, there are certain things about TradFi that are worth keeping because they have been proven to work, and customer differentiation via rewards is one such idea.
We have to recognise that the traditional, centralized rewards business model is running out of mileage in a world that is rapidly changing and decentralizing. The new commerce architecture provided by Boson Protocol, combined with NiftyKey’s Rewards platform promises the very best of both worlds.
We can’t wait to see what Nifty Key will develop in the crypto rewards space and the benefits that our partners will be able to enjoy, rewarding the right behaviors and sustaining competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive world.
NiftyKey is onboarding new launch partners.
If you are part of a crypto business and want to offer crypto native rewards to your customers, you can become one of NiftyKey's launch partners.
Express your interest here: https://form.typeform.com/to/ABaJ62ga
About NiftyKey
Niftykey is a crypto-native rewards platform, powered by Boson protocol. It makes it easier to cut through the noise and improve lifetime value in order to enhance and differentiate your business by rewarding customers with real-world products and services.
Visit www.NiftyKey.com for more information.
To contact NiftyKey, click here.
About Boson Protocol
Boson Protocol’s vision is to enable a decentralized commerce ecosystem by funding and enabling the development of a stack of specialist applications to disrupt, demonopolize and democratize commerce.
Boson Protocol achieves this via an open tokenized economy of things which:
- automates the redemption of digital rights for physical assets using NFTs encoded with game theory.
- disrupts e-commerce platforms by tokenizing things and their data within a liquid digital market, built on DeFi.
Keen to learn more about Boson Protocol? Read our Lightpaper:
Let’s build an Open tokenized economy together.
- Find out more about us at www.BosonProtocol.io
- Check us out on Twitter.
- Join our Telegram discussions here.
- Want to dive deeper? Read our whitepaper.
Lastly, if you’re a decentralization enthusiast, please follow us here, on Medium. We will post frequently about our dCommerce journey and would love to hear your comments!
