Big Brands Replacing Membership, Loyalty Programs With NFTs

Hang, a B2B startup, is using NFTs to innovate loyalty programs for a number of big brands. The firm’s clients include Budweiser, Bleacher Report, Pinkberry, Bonnaroo and Superfly.

“For most brands at a certain scale, it’s pretty hard to offset increasing customer acquisition costs,” Hang co-founder and CEO Matt Smolin said to CNBC in a report. “The best way to do that is by increasing the lifetime value of their user base and harnessing loyalty.”

He added that loyalty programs are often designed with a tier-based system: the more a customer buys something, the more benefits they get.

He said NFTs can give companies a way to incentivize users to level up in the program and “actually appreciate the value of the asset that they own and can later be resold on [NFT] marketplaces,” the report notes.

CNBC notes there could be risk to this approach, as critics have called NFTs potentially harmful to the environment because of the energy they use. Also, there’s a lot of crime and theft that surrounds the digital tokens.

The company said last week that it had raised $16 million in a Series A round. The round was led by crypto venture firm Paradigm, and other investors included Tiger Global, eyewear firm Warby Parker, shoe retailer Allbirds and Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures, among others.

PYMNTS wrote that the High Court of England and Wales recently allowed the serving of court documents as NFTs.

See more: NFTs Are Now a Legal Way to Serve Documents in UK Courts

This is the first time it’s been done in the U.K. and only the second time in the world, after a U.S. court allowed it once in June.

“Service” tends to mean the steps required by the court to bring documents used in a court proceeding to a person’s attention. In this case, D’Aloia v. Binance Holdings & Others, an Italian engineer has filed a claim against four crypto exchanges after his cryptocurrency was stolen.