Rewards Token is a new cryptocurrency about to have its ICO and it is promising to shake up the world of customer loyalty programmes.
The industry of loyalty points is massive, with over $300 billion distributed annually across the world.
However, most people find it difficult to keep track of all the different reward schemes they are part of and programmes are constantly changing their terms, leading to disappointment and frustration amongst participants and many loyalty points going unclaimed.
Rewards Token are aiming to solve these problems with a cryptocurrency that can be used across hundreds of reward schemes, making everything much simpler and more rewarding for consumers and businesses alike.
Below we will take a look at how the Rewards Token will work, what the benefits will be and the terms of the ICO.
What Rewards Token is All About
Back in 1793, a store owner wanted to drive more loyalty with his customers, so decided to offer them copper tokens for their loyalty, which they could redeem for products from his store.
The scheme worked very well and spawned the industry that we know today as customer loyalty programmes. These include everything from air miles to cash back schemes and points that can be redeemed for products of all kinds. The industry is worth an estimated $300bn and 85% of consumers belong to at least one loyalty scheme. The average US household is a member of 29 loyalty schemes and 84% of US businesses have some form of rewards programme.
However, whilst loyalty programmes are part of our everyday lives, they are not without their problems. Keeping track of so many schemes is difficult for consumers and with each one having its own rules — which often change midway through — means that 35% of loyalty discounts go unclaimed.
This isn’t good for businesses either because it means they are not building the loyalty aimed for by their schemes. At the same time, loyalty points are a liability on corporations’ books, so they often try to diminish the worth of points or change the terms to reduce those liabilities, causing the consumer to often feel shortchanged when they come redeem their points.
Rewards.com already have their own loyalty programme running and have over 7,000 businesses that use it. They have set up schemes for businesses such as American Airlines, American Express and InterContinental Hotels and have developed software and apps for a number of Fortune 500 companies.
But now they are planning to tackle the problems of loyalty schemes described above by having a cryptocurrency that will operate as a universal loyalty token that all businesses and customers can use.
Rewards Token — How It Will Work
The Rewards Token will be a single marketplace for businesses to use. Instead of offering their normal rewards like discounts and cash back, businesses will reward their loyal customers with Reward Tokens.
This ecosystem will bring together over 100 million products and 7,000 existing merchant relationships with a variety of different businesses including travel, retail, restaurants and entertainment businesses.
It is Reward’s aim that customers will be able to use their Reward Tokens to redeem virtually anything. So instead of having to keep track of dozens or even hundreds of different schemes, they will just keep track of one: The Rewards Token. They can simply check how many tokens they have and then what offers are available for using their tokens to redeem products or services.
In addition to earning Rewards Tokens through purchases, people will be able to top up their holdings by buying tokens on exchanges. So if for example you had 999 tokens but just needed 1 more to be able to claim a great offer like a free concert ticket, you could go to an exchange and buy that extra 1 token you need.
Rewards plan to build a mobile app which will allow you to collect tokens and redeem offers with just a tap of your mobile phone.
Benefits of Rewards Token
There will be considerable benefits to the Rewards Token scheme, including:
- Receiving exclusive offers and special access to tickets before they go on general sale.
- Being able to take part in contests and sweepstakes to win additional prizes.
- Ease of tracking — just one scheme rather than dozens.
- Being able to sell tokens on exchanges if people don’t want to claim product rewards.
- So all in all there will be quite a few benefits of the Reward Tokens.
ICO Details
The pre-sale has already taken place and ran from 14th February to 15th April 2018.
The main public sale is now underway and here are the main details for it:
· Token: Reward Token (RWRD)
· Maximum number of tokens: 400 million
· Tokens available during main ICO: 200 million (i.e. 50%)
· Token price: 1 ETH = 1800 RWRD (i.e. 1 RWRD =$0.39 at time of writing)
· Soft Cap: 3,000 ETH ($2m)
· Hard Cap: 75,000 ETH ($52m)
· Sale starts: Main sale underway
· Sale ends: TBD
ICO Ratings
The ICO has been reviewed by ICO rating sites and has generally received very good ratings. Here are some of the main ones:
- Track ICO: 5/5
- ICO Bench: 3.6/5
- Found ICO: 8.7/10
- ICO Creed: 4.9/5
- ICO Marks: 9.2/10
As well as these ratings, Rewards also won an award for Best ICO by Coin Agenda.
Conclusion — Rewards Token ICO
The Rewards Token ICO has certainly been attracting a lot of interest, with over 40,000 Telegram members and over 30,000 Twitter followers.
The logic behind the project makes a lot of sense and if there was just one loyalty scheme to keep track of and a universal token you could use across all of them, it would makes things much easier for everyone concerned and participation in loyalty schemes would probably skyrocket.
The question — as seems to be the case with so many of these ICOs — is what kind of take-up they can achieve, particularly amongst businesses. Although Rewards.com already work with a number of big companies, it is unclear from their White Paper as to which of these companies have signed up specifically to the Rewards Token cryptocurrency, so some clarification on this point would be most welcome. If they could get some of the Fortune 500 companies mentioned to sign up, then the project could be a massive success.
So it remains to be seen how successful the project will be, but it does have great potential and the strong interest from the crypto community is indicative of that potential.
You can check out the Rewards Token ICO here