loyal Joins the Touchpoint Open Builders Program

First No-Code Access to Loyalty Assets as NFTs

In times of increasing customer acquisition costs and cost-push inflation, bonding and incentivizing a customer is key to businesses. World-class brands mostly do it themselves: For example, Starbucks has built Odyssey, “where you can unlock access to new benefits and immersive coffee experiences.” But what about the non-Starbuck-level brands? In the near future, they may well be using the latest addition to the Touchpoint Open Builders Program: loyal.

Developed by German software developers Loyal Systems Innovvation GmbH, loyal promises a no-code tool for gastronomy, hospitality, service providers, and retailers to launch their own loyalty assets as NFTs. Those loyalty assets can be anything: vouchers, coupons, cross-brand membership levels, access to unique products, or utility. Think of Starbucks Odyssey unleashed as a PaaS that every B2C business or ecosystem can use.

Here, loyal introduces itself in its own words.

loyal strives to make decentralized tech available to gastronomy, hospitality, service providers, and retailers to help them win and retain customer loyalty. Most businesses lack the resources to develop their own loyalty assets and get them in front of their customer base or community. With loyal, even non-tech native businesses can easily create loyalty assets. Likewise, businesses can use our marketplace to get their campaigns directly in front of their audience.

From the customer perspective: Imagine loyal as OpenSea but for all the loyalty assets you can possibly think of. Which brands do you often visit or shop at? By offering their NFTs via our app’s marketplace, these brands will incentivize you to check out the loyal app almost as often as Instagram.

Many of our competitors follow a multi-chain approach, which motivates speculators to enter the game of adding or purchasing loyalty assets in their wallets (and ultimately selling them for a profit at common marketplaces or publishing them on Instagram).

In contrast, as of today, we prefer to focus more on community and value and less on the speculative aspect. We want community members to earn, purchase or add loyalty assets while also redeeming them in-shop. So all assets stay in the loyal app’s ecosystem for now, to discourage speculators from entering the space. In future, you may connect social media to show what you’ve earned or been rewarded with and battle against other users. Also, EVM compatibility may be added as loyalty assets become more valuable.

A bit more about us. We’re a bootstrapped team of enthusiasts with expertise in the areas of web3, business development, and coding. Local Founder Maximilian Aßmann, leads our Operations & Strategy, Caspar Fritzen leads our Tech & Community, Nicolas Aßmann leads Marketing & Sales, and Robert Frank leads Tech & Development.

Unlike many other teams from the Web3 space, we’re targeting a very broad, “everyday Joe” audience – coffee drinkers included. Our audience may not have heard of Web3 before but is directly steered in a real-life NFT use case, on Shimmer, as soon as it adds a first loyalty asset into a loyal wallet.

We’re pursuing a step-by-step approach, guiding ourselves along our defined milestones and releasing functionality fragmentally rather than en block. Thus, we’ll be starting with NFTs as coupons, unlocking utilities such as a discount off your total bill, or 2-for-1 offers on product groups. In the long run, we’ll be disruptive to the extent that businesses will for the first time be able to offer inter-brand loyalty assets: frequent spending at brand X (for example your favourite coffee chain) will unlock utility, higher level, and/or collectibles at brand Y (for example, your go-to airline).

As an underlying tech, Shimmer’s Tangle will supplement such functionality by ensuring transparency across all purchase, exchange, and redemption transactions of NFTs. Additionally, Shimmer’s feeless policy delivers multiple advantages to our use case: it primarily ensures competitiveness as we can onboard as many brands as possible with a low-price strategy. Coupons may be minted by users without triggering cost and exchanges of coupons between users do not incur gas fees that fall under Apple’s IAP policy. Shimmer’s feeless nature and its strong community fundamentally facilitate our start into Web3. Likewise, the IOTA community can benefit from a broad, everyday use-case being realized on loyal, involving multiple well-known brands, tendency increasing.

loyal will be the first customer loyalty project released on Shimmer mainnet! loyal starts by delivering utility NFT coupons for major German coffee brands from 1 February 2023 onwards – so feel free to download us in the App Store or Play Store.

Stay tuned for the next wave of users (in this case, coffee drinkers) using web3. This is the start of an NFT-based loyalty and reward play potentially being available just around your corner, from your nearest coffee shop to your favorite online shop. Also, online shop owners: stay tuned for our next big update where non-physical stores and apps will be supported. While we start with brand-centered coupons in early February, don’t miss what’s to come: inter-brand NFTs unlocking a selection of utility, membership programs built on L1 NFTs, gamification with real-world value, and much more!”

Could this be the end of crumpled “buy 10 get 1 free” loyalty cards lying forgotten in my wallet? Let’s hope so! Touchpoint is excited to welcome loyal to the Shimmer network. Follow them on Twitter at @loyal_web3, visit them on Discord – or even follow them on Instagram.

About Touchpoint

loyal joins the Touchpoint Open Builders Program, offering participants a community of like-minded builders, direct access to experts, knowledge, and general support to launch and scale the next generation of decentralized applications and infrastructure on the Shimmer network. You can learn more about how Touchpoint works and how to become a part of it here.

About Shimmer

Shimmer is an L1 innovation network providing the core building blocks for a scalable, modular multi-chain architecture. Similar to the IOTA network, Shimmer is built on a UTXO-based parallelized, directed acyclic graph (DAG), guaranteeing higher scalability than conventional Blockchains. At the same time, Shimmer ensures interoperability and composability of L2 smart contract chains, capable of connecting any type of L2 smart contract chain anchored to it. With its unique tokenization framework, Shimmer will become a multi-asset ledger for feeless minting and transfer of native assets without middlemen or crippling gas fees.

The native token of Shimmer is SMR, which serves as the network’s economic backbone, facilitating value transactions and interactions within the Shimmer ecosystem. Shimmer users use the SMR token to launch new DeFi applications, DEXs, NFTs, DAOs, and other dApps.

Disclaimer

Every project that participates in Touchpoint is given the opportunity to introduce itself in its own words. Statements made by projects are not verified by Touchpoint, Shimmer, or the IOTA Foundation and should not be taken as an endorsement. Individuals are advised to always conduct their own due diligence when engaging with any crypto projects.