Loyalty Has Been a Lie

Let me be direct: the loyalty industry has been lying to you.

Not in the fine print. In the premise.

For decades, brands have built systems designed to extract loyalty from users. Points programs. Tiered rewards. Expiring balances. The whole apparatus engineered around one question: how do we make them loyal to us?

And it worked - for the brands. They captured behavior. They created switching costs. They built psychological traps dressed up as perks.

But here's what they never asked: are we being loyal to them?

You spend $100 to get $1 worth of points. That's not a reward - that's a worse exchange rate than cash back, wrapped in inflation psychology to make you feel like you're winning. Points expire. Programs change. Terms update. Redemption thresholds shift. "No availability" becomes the default response.

Airlines figured this out decades ago: they make more money selling miles to credit card companies than flying planes. American Airlines generated $2.5 billion from their loyalty program in a single year - while the actual airline often operates at a loss. They want your miles to expire worthless. Every unredeemed point is pure profit. Every blackout date is intentional.

That's not loyalty. That's manipulation with a friendlier name.

How I Saw It

I wasn't looking to fix loyalty. I was working on something else entirely - a layer 0 blockchain that, honestly, no one would ever end up hearing about. Technical infrastructure. The unsexy stuff.

But while I was deep in that work, an idea kept surfacing: what if users could opt into a snapshot of their effort? What if the things they did - staking, interacting, engaging - could be funneled from scattered native rewards into something harder, more stable, more theirs? A persistent value they could carry across an exclusive economy.

That was the seed.

I started noticing something else. Every Web3 project was spinning up gamification. Points here. Badges there. Airdrops farmed like day jobs by people who would dump and disappear. None of it was creating loyalty. Most of it would hurt their charts before it ever brought real users.

The whole system was broken. Not just inefficient - philosophically inverted.

And then it clicked: this isn't just a Web3 problem. This is loyalty itself. The entire industry got it backwards.

The Flip

Traditional loyalty asks: How do we capture customer loyalty?

We asked: How do we reward it?

That's the flip. It sounds simple, but it changes everything.

In the old model, users prove their loyalty to brands. They repeat purchases. They hit thresholds. They play the game. And brands decide - unilaterally - whether that's worth rewarding.

In our model, users engage with an ecosystem. Their effort is recognized. Their value accumulates. And brands? Brands contribute to that value. They don't capture it. They don't trap it. They add to it.

The user holds the balance. The user decides where it spends. The user is the center of the system - not the target of it.

The Liability Trap

Old loyalty creates debt. Every unredeemed point is a liability on a balance sheet. Brands are currently holding $48B in debt they hope users forget about. We turn that debt into liquidity. By letting users spend points elsewhere in the network, you clear your books, reduce liability, and acquire customers for free.

What I Believe

I'm not special. I'm a builder. A product person. Someone who solves problems because that's what I do. But I can typically discern a pain point when I see one, and this pain point is everywhere.

Here's what I believe deeply enough to build a company around it:

Users are the pressure cooker that makes brands. Without them, you're nothing. You cannot buy their loyalty. Not really. The moment someone else offers a better price, they're gone - because they were never loyal to you. They were loyal to themselves. As they should be.

The industry calls it "breakage" when points go unredeemed. They treat it as profit. But breakage is actually a symptom of failure - proof that users don't value what you're offering enough to even claim it. High breakage means your program is being ignored. It means you've lost.

So stop trying to buy them. Stop trying to trap them. Stop designing systems that treat their engagement as something to extract.

Instead: cultivate their interest. Recognize their value. Give them something that grows. Something that travels. Something that's actually theirs.

That's not weakness. That's the only thing that works.

I'm Not Guessing

Over $200 billion. That's how much sits in unredeemed loyalty points globally, according to McKinsey. Some estimates put it even higher - up to $360 billion. Either way, we're talking about more than the GDP of most countries - sitting in digital drawers, slowly expiring, creating value for no one.

The average person belongs to 15–18 loyalty programs. They actively use less than half. They're not lazy. They're drowning. Every program is a separate app, a separate login, a separate set of rules that don't connect to anything else.

90% of consumers say they want to redeem rewards across multiple brands. Ninety percent. That's not a niche demand. That's nearly everyone. And yet - fewer than 5% of programs offer it.

30–50% of all loyalty points go unredeemed. Not because users don't want rewards - because the system makes it too hard, too fragmented, too worthless to bother.

The data shows that network-connected rewards - where rewards travel between brands - deliver twice the ROI of single-brand programs. Not marginally better. Twice as good.

The flip isn't just more ethical. It's better business.

The Invitation

This manifesto isn't a pitch. It's a statement of belief.

If you're a user: you deserve more than points that expire and programs that don't respect your time. Your engagement has value. Real value. And you should get to keep it.

If you're a brand: you don't need another loyalty program. You need to be part of something bigger. A network where your customers are already earning. Where contributing to their value is how you earn their attention.

If you're building in this ecosystem: you don't have to solve loyalty yourself. The layer exists. Plug in. Focus on your product. Let the network handle the rest.

We're not asking you to be loyal to us.

We're building something that's loyal to you.

Because loyalty has never been about trapping customers. It's about earning the right to keep them.