Universal Reward Protocol

Idea&Token

We are all customers in different stores, but corporations use our data to make marketing campaigns without our approval. Thus, blockchain technology may return rights on sharing data back and let us define who can use it, receiving reward for this. Universal Reward Protocol (URP) is a protocol that allows retailers to reward shoppers for any shopping behavior, online and offline (visiting a store, sharing content on social media, making a purchase…), and for sharing the corresponding data. URP team will try to solve three main problems of shoppers with this protocol:

• Data privacy;
• Personalized experience (online and in-store);
• Non-fungibility of most loyalty reward programs.

The project is supposed to help both sides – customers and retailers, as the last ones will gain data to define an economic incentive for individual shoppers to accomplish a certain behavior, while customers will receive rewards in URP tokens and more personalized experience. The main goal is to build an ecosystem of decentralized applications on top of the decentralized protocol layer, producing Proof-of-Behaviors encompassing all aspects of the interactions between shoppers, retailers and brands.

Universal Reward Protocol has already established partnerships with several most common retailers’ networks operators, as for example Auchan and Carrefour and implemented in-store behavior analysis technology there.

Their URP token, a generic ERC20 utility token, has a dual function: to reward shoppers and to use them as incentive for all stakeholders to behave correctly, preventing fraud and securing the network.

The total supply of the URP tokens is fixed at 600 million and only 40% of them will be distributed on ICO. 35% will be reserved, 15% – team’s founding and other 10% will be distributed to advisors (5%), incentive programs and subcontractors (5%).

Team

The team consists of 10 members, including specialists in business strategy, marketing, and IT. Co-founders graduated MSc. Ecole Polytechnique (1st Engineering School in France) and UC Berkeley. Moreover, COO – Thomas Wolf – is the former CEO of Catalina Marketing, world leader in digital couponing with revenues worth of $1B. The team is experienced as they launched the Occi project at the beginning of 2015. There are 7 advisors, including retail and blockchain experts as for example François Poupard (former head of innovation at Auchan), Samuel Baroukh (CDO of Nestlé), and Jeremy Bokobza (lead blockchain engineer at Stratis).

Summary

The team has a good vision of the problem and tries to solve in a way that can bring a benefit for both sides – retailers and customers. Partnerships with one of the biggest retailers in the world and implemented protocols are important, as all the investors will want to see how it really works. On the other hand, there is not enough of hype around the project. A Technical Whitepaper will be released soon where the team is planning to explain their solution for the issue with scalability and transaction cost as the protocol was built on top of Ethereum blockchain.

Project that promises to solve customers’ data security issues, at the same time helping retailers to improve their services, definitely deserves attention.