Paper Review: Experiences from the Field: Unify Rewards — A Cryptocurrency Loyalty Program
A group of 3 experts: Philip Shelper (CEO from LoyaltyX), Andrew Lowe (Managing Director from PicoLabs) and Salil S. Kanhere (School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney) have conducted a field trial by creating a live-market loyalty program called Unify Rewards which mimicked other loyalty programs, with the main difference being the reward — Ether — one of the most popular cryptocurrencies.
Unify Rewards — A Cryptocurrency Loyalty Program is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits distributionand reproduction in any medium as well allowing derivative works, provided that you attribute the original work to the author(s) and FAB 2018.Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain (FAB ’18) March 9, 2018, Los Angeles, California, USA.
The aim of this field study is to answer the question if cryptocurrency-based loyalty programs have the potential to disrupt the loyalty industry. The trial ran in 5 weeks with the participation of 12 merchants and 177 students and staffs at UNSW (The University of New South Wales). UNSW is one of Australia’s leading research and teaching universities with high quality teaching programs and many students have good knowledge of blockchain and crypto world.
For each transaction, the participant earned 1 stamp, which could be converted into Ether and he had a range of redeeming options:
- Cash his balance into an e-wallet,
- Sell that amount of Ether at the actual market rate and get money in his bank account,
- Transfer it to another participant.
The result was encouraging with engagement rate up to 79%, higher in comparison to industry averages (57% of a major supermarket chain and 37% of a major liquid chain)
The participants found the program to be more rewarding, motivating and appealing than their favorite loyalty program. They found the concept is interesting since the value can fluctuate and it is a great experience to learn about how it works and what influences it. The possibility of growing value and ability to cash out when you like is very attractive.
The paper has came to an conclusion that traditional loyalty programs carry limitations including lack of utility, ability to expire and devaluation characteristics so it would not be unusual in the history of loyalty for them to be replaced by a new currency design — the crypto one. While some companies may choose to utilize existing, popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, the bigger opportunity is for a company to create an original loyalty cryptocurrency with full control over the amount created and how it is distributed.
They also mentioned EZToken as one of the companies specialized in blockchain loyalty which has “positioned their approach as one which will disrupt the loyalty industry”
The research has strengthened our belief in the bright future of EZToken and proved that our choice of Australia as the first step in our globalization plan is a smart move thanks to Australian government’s warm welcome to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.
For further details, download the paper here
