Minter 2: A public blockchain as a Global Rewards Network
Tokenize it!
There is no doubt that in the next five years, everything (every major or popular asset, good, and service) will be tokenized to an extent where people, companies, and governments can easily interact with one another on a peer-to-peer basis, leaving most of the intermediaries behind. Just like the Internet at its core let us all consume information right from original sources, DLTs (distributed ledger technologies) will empower economies — large and small — to be more efficient. And the only thing that’s holding us behind is the need to keep up with ever-improving end-user experience.
With our team’s ultimate goal of building the Internet of Money (all types of monies that anyone can operate, send, receive, and swap), we are currently moving to Minter’s stage two at which we must prove one concept — loyalty points a.k.a. private money of companies can be tokenized and used with a greater efficiency than off-chain predecessors. We’ve spent the last three years laying the infrastructure level of our Network — blockchain, SDKs, tools, prototypes, etc. — and will now deploy something really useful for all of us: developers, early adopters, companies, and users alike. While many blockchain communities strive to make sense of their technological breakthroughs, we’ve had a vision from the start — user experience must be the commanding voice of all processes. People (and businesses they run), not geeks, should ripe all the benefits of decentralization. New products should not hit the market leaving any of potential users behind due to complexity.
As I’ve mentioned above, we’ll be proving our concept in the field of private money, namely loyalty points and rewards (as well as cashbacks, bonuses, airdrops, giveaways, game credits, and so on — everything that’s used to grow engagement of communities), and that’s exactly why we called this stage “a public blockchain as a global rewards network.” When Amazon started, it didn’t become the world’s largest marketplace overnight; it didn’t target every possible category at once, either. It first picked the book delivery niche to learn how everything worked in practice — everyone was a consumer of paper books those days, and Amazon offered 10 times more titles than a typical brick-and-mortar shop due to the technological advantage an online store could provide. It is this very expertise of making something people really want and can use frequently that matters in the early markets such as blockchain. In our case, we will learn to create, exchange, and operate loyalty points within Minter Network.
Make something people want
Our choice of the target market was well planned. We conducted numerous profound research studies that you’re welcome to take a look at (if you can free up an hour or two in your schedule):
– How big-name brands build loyalty
– Top-notch SaaS solutions for creating loyalty systems
We also did a legal study on the classification of points and rewards so that no one’s surprised when products start full-scale deployment.
Our team has been preparing for this market for over a year now, and one of the major steps we took was to put forward a proposal to modify Minter Network by introducing the option to archive coins while preserving the ticker. It was a very important decision, and we say “thank you” to everyone who supported it. As brands and firms evolve and may want to change terms and conditions of their programs over time, it is crucial that they have management flexibility.
What are the three layers that I envision as a product manager at Grom?
- For devs: the network itself acting as a single environment for creating and managing points and rewards. This level also includes all the interfaces such as Console, BIP Wallet, explorers, and notification bots.
- For early adopters: this layer only slightly reminds us that everything’s built around blockchain (no need to learn about blocks, TXs, seed phrases, and other nerdy stuff) while presented in our ecosystem as MinterID and Minter wallet (working title: “Pocket”) products. The latter will allow you to hold, send, receive, swap, and use points and rewards to pay for digital goods and services such as Spotify or Xbox Live. Think of this layer as a “PayPal/Venmo for rewards.”
- For the very end-users: both businesses and individuals. Take Pinpon, for example. With it, brands can reward community members for being engaged in their campaigns. At the same time, neither party interacts with the blockchain directly — they simply don’t need to as the only thing they’re after is efficiency.
To better understand this structure, imagine the first level as Amazon Web Services’ S3, where developers can store any files on secure servers distributed around the globe. The second level would be something like Dropbox, which relies on Amazon but is used by a wider audience for, say, keeping photos. The third level — Instagram — also depends on Amazon and stores photos like Dropbox, but no one, especially brands and regular people, really ever thinks of specs, storage limits, or file formats. We just use it.
Minter Network today is AWS for minting coins, on top of which we develop Wallet for early adopters and Pinpon for end-users. Devs, early adopters, end-users — I’m repeating these definitions over and over again on purpose, to provide some general understanding. These three groups are essentially our “customers,” meaning we at Grom must carefully research what their real problems are and how our solutions help in solving them.
Let’s now look at our solutions upside down:
- Pinpon helps people get benefits from brands for everyday actions — e.g., take a quiz to get free goods.
- Wallet allows people to collect and manage all of their loyalty points and rewards from within one place; all you need is email sign-in with Google.
- Minter Network helps developers design their rewards programs in the most efficient way possible.
Since Pinpon and Wallet are pretty big stories themselves, we’ll speak about them in more detail a bit later because we want to make a proper introduction and hear your feedback as well. Today, I’ll focus on the network, a global rewards network, and what brands demand to finally get the maximum out of blockchain.
Minter 2 Specs
Here are the requirements I’ve personally come up with. You can add yours in the comments section below:
- High speed
- Security and finality
- Ease of creating a point
- Flexible management
- Exchangeability
- Stability
- Synchronization with an internal corporate system
- Universal integrations
To cut a long story short, I’ll just put it into one sentence: brands, that are ready to connect to a global rewards network should be able to do it through their usual corporate solutions and get flexible and secure terms of execution of their transactions, be at least as fast as other systems, run campaigns that their partners can easily integrate, have a stable exchange rate (if needed) or a reward with no price at all. Quite a list, right? And yet, 70% of it is already a reality in Minter, and the remaining 30% will be implemented with the arrival of Minter 2.
How loyalty points and rewards will benefit from tokenization
The latest trend in brand loyalty systems is collaboration. Look at how many joint projects were launched in the last five years, and what I mean is not just co-branding but partnered solutions. The idea of blending audiences is so efficient that you won’t find a single major business that wouldn’t have tried at least one bundle:
- Cola and burger
- Flight and hotel
- Sneakers and training app
- TV and streaming service
- And my favorite among the most recent ones, KFC wings and iconic Crocs
One can’t bring a closed system to the competition table in an open world, they need to constantly seek for strong partners and offer services that would benefit both clienteles. That’s why rewards and loyalty points are becoming a one-of-a-kind tool for mutual engagement, when frequent-flyer miles of an airline can be used to book a hotel room, and points from purchasing a pair of sneakers can be redeemed towards a fitness app subscription. These cases need no middlemen — even more so when the offer involves three partners or more and security and independence of execution are of vital importance. Blockchain points are unique, terms of their use are verifiable, and no one can influence the processes if there are cryptographic signatures.
Minter will unite brands and their users just like Visa/MasterCard unite banks, stores, sites, and people. They call it a Global Payments Network, while we are a Global Rewards Network. And there’s no better infrastructure for such a goal than an open public blockchain that any brand, any digital goods/services provider, any user with a wallet (including branded ones) can be part of.
Very soon, the network will upgrade to version 1.2, and within a month, we’ll release a big Minter 2 announcement with detailed technical description of all new opportunities. And those opportunities will let us build the network of rewards, test the concept on real implementations, and start full-fledged integrations worldwide.
Got rewards?
