Blackbird: The Consumer Crypto App That Normies Love

It’s finally happened. Regular people are using an application without realizing that it utilizes crypto rails on the back end.

This will likely be the first domino in a series of multiple dominoes. The technology is finally at a point where backend integration into consumer-facing applications can be done seamlessly. Now, it’s about finding the applications that will benefit from crypto infrastructure.

Our topic of today’s conversation, Blackbird, has cracked the code by creating a loyalty and rewards system for the restaurant industry.

Let’s dive in.

What is BlackBird?

Blackbird is a loyalty, rewards, and payments app for the restaurant industry. Users can earn different rewards and perks for dining out, checking in, and making payments through the app with Blackbird partner restaurants. At the time of writing, it only applies to certain US cities.

Blackbird is an app designed to meet the needs of restaurant operators in the digital age while also providing a seamless and beneficial dining experience for restaurantgoers.

The problem

The restaurant industry in the US accounts for almost 5% of the GDP. Its sales have increased roughly 9%-11% year over year and outpaced the growth of the S&P 500.

Despite this, restaurants are still drowning. Around 60% of restaurants close within the first year. This is mainly because margins plummeted from 20% to as low as 4% due to the demands of the digital age.

• Payment processing fees
• Third-party delivery app fees
• In-house technology systems
• Website/app maintenance

These are just a few costs of operating a successful restaurant in the modern age. Naturally, given the competitive nature of the business, most will drown.

Yes, you have the occasional place that gets revived through a viral social media post, but most of those are as short-lived as your favorite Pump.fun shitcoin. Attention simply shifts to the next hot thing.

Enter Blackbird

What modern restaurants need is a shift in focus.

A shift in focus towards better data to segment their guests into different categories. Then design systems/incentive structures for each category to create retention. This retention can then be used to increase topline revenue.

Thankfully, Blackbird does all of this for restaurants through one application. No additional costs on intermediaries, just direct business to customer on a seamless UI.

How does Blackbird work?

1. Download the app on your phone
   1. iOS & Android
2. Link payment method
   1. Credit card, debit card, Apple Pay, etc.
3. Explore the app and see all the Blackbird partner restaurants with the available perks
   1. You will have a choice between thousands of restaurants, bars, and cafes with different perks
4. Check in through the app to earn $FLY points (more on this later)
   1. Check in by tapping your phone on the Blackbird puck at the restaurant or directly on the app
5. Payment through the Blackbird app
   1. Swipe checkout via the app
   2. Group bookings can be split on the app itself
   3. Data is encrypted in transit
   4. No more awkwardly raising your hand at waiters to ask for the cheque
6. Earn rewards/perks and level up your loyalty status
   1. Each check-in and payment transaction through the app earns users FLY points
   2. Frequent users collect more points to get higher-tier perks
   3. The most frequent users become eligible for special programs like
      1. Blackbird Breakfast Club
      2. Bar Blackbird
      3. Blackbird Club

With how intuitive and useful the platform is, it’s no surprise that it’s seen a massive rise in popularity. Surprisingly enough, the majority of users are non-crypto natives. It improves the dining experience for all parties involved while also creating a sense of community among members.

Now that you understand how the app works, let’s move on to its crypto element.

The tech behind Blackbird

The backbone of Blackbird’s crypto integration is Blackbird Flynet.

Flynet is a layer-3 chain built on top of the Base layer-2. This network serves four key functions:

1. Payment processing: Flynet supports Blackbird Pay, which allows diners to pay for meals with FLY tokens as well as USDC through its integration with Coinbase.
   1. This charges restaurants a flat 2% fee rather than the 3.5%-4% charged by card providers.
      
2. Loyalty system: The issuance and redemption of FLY tokens with Blackbird Labs is facilitated through Flynet on the backend.
   
3. Data marketplaces: Flynet also serves as the infrastructure upon which developers can create any sort of application, such as data marketplaces, data visualization boards, marketing tools, and so on.
   1. A portion of the Flynet treasury will be set aside to support applications built on the network.
      
4. Guest Value Score: Restaurants will be able to get much better data through Flynet, such as dining frequency, spending habits, individual customer preferences, FLY balance, and much more, to create their own guest value scores for individual guests.
   1. This data allows restaurants to adjust their strategy, create new incentive structures, offer personalized perks for special guests, and more.

The other vital element to dive deeper into is the two tokens.

The FLY & F2 tokens

As stated earlier, the FLY token is a rewards token available exclusively on the Blackbird app. It can be bought in the app from Blackbird Labs and redeemed in the app for cash or stablecoins.

These are the basic functions of FLY:

• Restaurants receive FLY from Blackbird Labs once partnered
• Diners are rewarded with fly tokens
  • Check-in and payment through the app instantly trigger FLY rewards
  • Restaurants can offer FLY to customers through personalized perks/incentives
  • Sharing data/information on the app also rewards users with FLY
• Restaurants that receive FLY as payment can sell it back to Blackbird Labs through the app for cash or hold onto it for any other purpose of their choosing
• FLY throughput, which is the combined amount of FLY held and used, records how much a user contributed to the Blackbird restaurant economy.

The FLY token is essentially like an onchain AMEX. One token gives you access and perks to thousands of establishments. If you keep stacking FLY, you can ultimately dine out purely on FLY tokens.

The F2 token will be the Flynet network's gas token. So, there are a couple of key things to note here.

Firstly, users of the Blackbird app will NOT have to pay any gas fees, so the F2 token doesn’t necessarily concern them. Secondly, F2 will have a fixed supply, whereas the FLY supply will vary in line with the growth of the Blackbird app itself, since Blackbird Labs decides the exchange rate.

In the initial phase, F2 is only important for those building applications on Flynet. Remember how we spoke about being able to build a variety of applications, like data marketplaces and so on, directly on Flynet? Well, the developers will be required to pay gas in F2.

Around 50% of the supply will be distributed over a four-year period to network participants, while the remaining is divided among the investors, team, and treasury.

But here’s where things get interesting.

Initially, all of Blackbirds' FLY tokens were offchain, effectively making them points. But with the launch of mainnet, all the FLY ‘points’ offchain on the app have been minted onchain and put directly into users' Blackbird wallets.

So, whoever used Blackbird and had FLY was, and will continue to be, eligible for F2 airdrops.

This means that all FLY transactions that happen through the app are now processed onchain on the backend, and the F2 token is the gas token for that network.

For the end user, nothing really changes; transacting FLY in-app remains pretty much the same. But on the backend, there’s this entire “onchain restaurant economy” if you will, which has all the transaction data and records made through the Blackbird app.

It’s pretty neat stuff.

Oh, and like most gas tokens, the F2 token will also eventually become a governance token once Blackbird reaches a point where it can adopt progressive decentralized governance.

Consumer crypto: The way forward  

We at blocmates have been covering consumer crypto for a long time now because it’s the only logical next step that makes sense.

By leveraging crypto infrastructure as the rails operating on the backend, you get a sleek and intuitive consumer-facing app that everyone can enjoy without even needing to know what a blockchain is.

Many of our fellow burger friends have told us that they know people IRL who have been using the Blackbird app alone, with no knowledge of its ties to crypto.

That’s what you call progression.