American Express has announced that they are applying blockchain technology to the membership rewards program. Basically this means they are allowing individual merchants to create custom Membership Rewards programs for American Express cardholders. Coindesk probably does a better job explaining this than I will, so I’d recommend reading this. I guess this is a way of letting individual merchants tap into the membership rewards program without the long lead times we’ve seen previously with coalition loyalty programs such as the failed Plenti. I’d be interested to know what the smart contracts look like and what individual merchants are paying on a per point basis.
In any case, the first partner for this new program is Boxed.com. They are offering 5x Membership Rewards on select purchases.
