The first time I personally saw gamify within things I used was when credit cards started to offer incentives such as loyalty rewards for using their credit card over others in the form of cash back or being able to exchange points for things like gift cards.

Credit Cards

Since then its exploded and I currently have some wild options such as 401k contributions, cash back, bonus cash back, reward points for trips, gift cards etc. and I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting about. In fact if you shop Amazon with your Amazon card you get 5% cash back. As long as you're paying off your credit card each month you can actully make some good extra grains but you do need to be extremely diligent in terms of making sure you always pay that card off. Just one missed payment can quickly set you back from all of the rewards you have earned.

The Gaming Space

We also started to see this type of system creep into business and in particular gaming. Where getting people to spend more time in a game equals a higher chance for the company to get you to buy something in game from them. This resulted in battle passes, daily rewards and other things to keep you coming back and collecting and playing the game. Many web3 games currently do this or are at least starting to adopt this.

While I get it that it kind of sucks a lot of web3 gaming at least right now is focused on profits and giving those profits back to the players. I'm not so angry about that as players get to have fun while getting ownership and revenue for supporting the games they believe in. While in the web2 world companies simply try to squeeze you for every dollar you have and leave you high and dry.

Crypto

A big thing about crypto used to be air drops. You used to pile into things for airdrops of which then many people simply dumped and would take years to ever come back to a normal price point, if you were lucky. This new push of a loyalty system in order to get tokens has started to pick up some traction as of late.

The idea of it is to do actions and other things that build loyalty points or some type of point system so that upon the release of the token you would get some or rewarded in another way for the new blockchain.

This system could be constantly applied even after the release of the chain and token allowing supporters to continue to be rewarded in some manner.

The issues with this type of system however, at least for the crypto and blockchain world is that the points earned are not on chain and are not transparent. Instead its done through some type of 3rd party application or something custom that the team has built offering up questions about its legitimacy in the crypto world. It could very well be that the companies behind these are totally legit, but only those working there or who have coded it will know for sure.

What are you thoughts on this recent trend of loyalty points in the crypto space?