loyal Joins the Touchpoint Open Builders Program
Touchpoint • 26 January 2023
First no-code access to loyalty assets as NFTs
In times of increasing customer acquisition costs and cost inflation, it is crucial for companies to retain customers and create incentives. The world's leading brands usually do this themselves: For example, Starbucks has launched “Odyssey,” “where you can unlock access to new benefits and immersive coffee experiences.” But what about brands that aren't Starbucks size? In the near future, they may be using the latest offering from the Touchpoint Open Builders Program: loyal. loyal promises a no-code tool for restaurants, hotels, service providers, and retailers to release their own loyalty assets as NFTs. These loyalty assets can be anything: vouchers, coupons, cross-brand membership levels, access to unique products, or useful features. Think of it like unleashing Starbucks Odyssey as a PaaS that any B2C company or ecosystem can use.
“loyal wants to make decentralized technology accessible to restaurants, hotels, service providers and retailers so that they can gain and maintain customer loyalty. Most companies lack the resources to develop their own loyalty assets and present them to their customer base or community. With loyal, even non-tech-savvy companies can easily create loyalty assets. They can also use our marketplace to get their campaigns directly in front of their audience. From a customer perspective: Imagine yourself as loyal as OpenSea, but for every type of loyalty asset imaginable. Which brands do you visit or buy often? By offering their NFTs through our app's marketplace, these brands will motivate you to check the LOYAL app almost as often as Instagram.
Many of our competitors take a multi-chain approach that motivates speculators to get in the game and add or buy loyalty assets into their wallets (and ultimately sell them profitably on mainstream marketplaces or post them on Instagram). On the other hand, we currently prefer a greater focus on community and value rather than on the speculative aspect. We want community members to earn, buy, or add loyalty assets and redeem them in the shop at the same time. As a result, all assets remain in the LOYAL app ecosystem for now to make it difficult for speculators to get started. In the future, you may be able to connect your social media to show what you've earned or received as a reward, and to measure yourself against other users. EVM compatibility could also be added as loyalty assets become more valuable.
A bit more about us: We are a self-financed team of enthusiasts with expertise in Web3, business development and coding. The local founder is Maximilian Assmann, who heads our Operations & Strategy, while Caspar Fritzen is responsible for Tech & Community. Nicolas Assmann heads Marketing & Sales, and Robert Frank is responsible for Tech & Development. In contrast to many other Web3 teams, we target a very wide audience, including the “average consumer” — including coffee drinkers. Our target audience may have never heard of Web3, but they're steered straight into a real-life NFT use case on Shimmer as soon as they add their first loyalty asset to a LOYAL wallet. We take a step-by-step approach, follow our defined milestones and publish the functions fragmentarily instead of in blocks. We are therefore starting with NFTs as vouchers that unlock discounts on the overall bill or 2-for-1 offers on specific product groups, for example.
In the long term, we will be so innovative that companies will be able to offer cross-brand loyalty assets for the first time: Frequent spending on brand X (e.g. your favorite coffee chain) unlocks benefits, higher levels and/or collectibles on brand Y (e.g. your preferred airline). As an underlying technology, Shimmers Tangle enables such functionalities by ensuring transparency across all purchase, exchange, and redemption processes of the NFTs. With its fee policy (no transaction fees), Shimmer also offers several advantages for our use case: This primarily ensures that we remain competitive as we can bring as many brands on board as possible with a low-price strategy. Vouchers can be created by users without triggering costs. And the exchange of vouchers between users is not subject to gas charges, which could fall under Apple's IAP policy. The toll-free nature of Shimmer and its strong community make our start in Web3 significantly easier. The IOTA community can also benefit from a broad everyday use case, which is implemented in loyal, and in which several well-known brands are involved — and the trend is rising. Loyal will be the first customer loyalty project to be published on the Shimmer mainnet!
loyal starts providing utility NFT vouchers for major German coffee brands on February 1, 2023 — so feel free to download our app from the App Store or Play Store. Stay tuned for the next wave of users (coffee drinkers in this case) using Web3. This is the start of an NFT-based loyalty and rewards concept that may be available just around the corner from your nearest coffee shop to your favorite online store. Online shop owners should also look forward to our next major update, which supports non-physical stores and apps. While we're launching brand-centric coupons in early February, don't miss out on what's to come: cross-brand NFTs that unlock a wide range of benefits, membership programs built on L1 NFTs, gamification with real value, and more!
Could this be the end of the crumpled “buy 10 get 1 free” stamp cards left lying around in my wallet? Let's hope so! Touchpoint is delighted to welcome loyally to the Shimmer network. Follow them on Twitter @loyal_web3, check them out on Discord — or even follow them on Instagram.