I just learned about Blackbird's technology platform and the restaurant loyalty program that they are currently building. On the surface, the way it works is that you walk into a restaurant and then tap your phone on one of their NFC-enabled chips (see above).
This then signals that you are/were there and so you earn loyalty points, kind of like a stamp on one of those cards in the food court. Except here, the idea is to create an endless and customizable array of wonderful customer experiences.
Maybe after 15 fifteen visits you're now considered "fam" (decided by the restaurant), and so you get a designated table at the restaurant and your favorite dessert automatically sent to your home on your birthday. This is just one example.
At the same time, you also earn $FLY, which is the platform's native crypto token (built on Base by Coinbase). And this to me is one of the most exciting aspects of the platform.
Because here is a crypto or web3 product that is seemingly really easy to use. In fact, nobody needs to know that it is doing things on a blockchain. Just tap your phone on the thingy. Earn stuff. And move on.
So I think it's a really good example of where we're headed in this space. The underlying technologies are going to recede into the background and all that we'll see are useful products and services.
Vitalik Buterin -- who is best known as the cofounder of Ethereum -- recently penned this post on his blog where he argues that "crypto cities broadly are an idea whose time has come." (Credit to Shamez Virani for sending the post to me this morning.) There has been a lot of discussion over the years about the rise of smart cities. I for one am not really sure what that means besides the fact that it sounds good and it likely involves a bunch of tech and data collection. But maybe crypto can help.
What Vitalik argues in his post is that we are now at a point in time where blockchain technologies have the opportunity to do two things for cities. One, we can take existing systems and processes and use blockchains to make them more "trusted, transparent, and verifiable." That would be a very good thing. But the more interesting one is number two. We have the opportunity to use blockchains to create radically new forms of asset ownership (land and other scarce assets) and municipal governance.
One specific example is that of a "city coin", which cities like Miami are already experimenting with. Supposedly they are one of the first, which of course aligns with Mayor Suarez's vision to position Miami as a preeminent tech and crypto hub. Though as Vitalik points out in his post, it's important to maintain some optionality, especially since we are still very much in the early innings of this new frontier. (