Chain.com and Gyft Announce Partnership To Bring Digital Gift Cards To The Blockchain
I’m pleased to announce that Chain.com has partnered with Gyft, a First Data subsidiary, who are using Chain’s platform to power USD digital gift card issuance, transfer, and redemption for their small and medium businesses that are using Clover terminals. The solution uses the Bitcoin blockchain as the payment rails, and tiny fractions of bitcoin to pay the fees required to ride these rails.
Blockchain issued digital gift cards will lower costs, reduce fraud, and provide merchants and brands with new marketing opportunities. These dollar denominated digital gift cards are powered by the Internet and open protocols, and the experience of using one will be familiar to anyone who has paid for something with a smart phone. The fact that bitcoin is being used as the enabling technology under the hood will be invisible to end users.
In this new model, a typical gift card will only cost a few cents over its lifetime, an order-of-magnitude cheaper than traditional gift cards. This cost savings is partly because multi-signature private keys secure the digital asset itself (as opposed to plain text codes which can easily be stolen), dramatically reducing fraud.
And since blockchain issued gift cards will, over time, interoperate with other digital assets like points and coupons, consumers will experience something new at checkout: their wallets will automatically detect which digital assets they can use to pay and then construct a single transaction with multiple inputs. For example, you could scan a merchant terminal with your smart phone and see all the available gift cards, coupons, points, and credits that the merchant accepts. Simply select the ones you want to spend and pay in a single tap.
In the near term, consumers will enjoy the benefit of being able to trade cards more easily, move them seamlessly between different wallets, and more consistently track their balances.
Gyft is using Chain’s enterprise asset issuance and management platform, co-signing service, and development sandbox. Today, our platform integrates with Open Assets, an open source protocol we actively contribute to, and over time we will also support other asset issuance protocols. Our partners, like Gyft, will enjoy a seamless development and production experience even as the underlying technology evolves.
Our team has really enjoyed working with Vinny, Giyom, Martin, and the rest of the Gyft team. If you aren’t a Gyft user, you should download their app here.
You can learn more about our blockchain partnership at Gyft’s site, https://block.gyft.com/.
