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249 sats \ 0 replies \ @IanM OP 18 Apr \ parent \ on: Ian Major AMA AMA
Definitely - for bitcoin businesses, our offering is not surprisingly a no-brainer. Even for more technical teams, they'd rather use a service vs. building a whole rewards and Lightning stack themselves. And the good news is with the number of bitcoin businesses growing, that's also good for our business.
BUT, our main learning is that it's still very early for non-bitcoin businesses. I'm repasting below something I shared in another post below to give you a sense of what that dialogue commonly looks like and how we're looking to use Taproot Assets to move us forward. Basically Taproot Assets help us put in smaller stepping stones to bridge businesses from where we are today to full-blown bitcoin rewards in the future.
Looking forward, I'm expecting these stepping stones will finally enable us to move the needle forward for traditional businesses and in 5-10 years I'd hope we have a vibrant loyalty network built on top of Lightning with users being able to easily exchange different loyalty units of value and convert them into sats. In the interim there's probably a lot we will need to do around infrastructure for Taproot Assets, and I'm sure we'll see Lightning itself continue to evolve as well.
Today, jumping straight to bitcoin is too big of a leap for the vast majority of businesses - I can give the best sales pitch in the world of why they should integrate bitcoin rewards (new customer acquisition, etc.), but they'll inevitably ask "well what about my existing customer base?" -- the answer of course is that maybe 10-20% of them would opt-in. At that point the business says well why bother.
So they need a way to increase that %. One way to do this is with branded (fungible) loyalty tokens that look and feel much more like a normal loyalty point to consumers (plus no business wants to willingly sacrifice the branding attached to their loyalty program). You can still back those assets with BTC, but it's packaged in a more accessible-looking vessel. Another thing you could do is back it with stablecoins instead of BTC - I know that sounds cringe to us, but now you've really removed every objection a business might have. If many businesses do this, it also gives consumers the ability to much more easily exchange these different forms of value vs. what they have today. And of course they can always convert into sats, and at least you've gotten people onto the network from which they can easily do that.