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With a total financing of up to $85 million, what is the Web3 project Blackbird targeting the catering industry going to do?
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Web3 restaurant loyalty and payment platform Blackbird was initiated by Ben Leventhal and is positioned as a loyalty and payment solution for the restaurant industry. Leventhal has more than 20 years of experience in the food and technology industry. As early as 2005, he co-founded the food information website Eater, which initially focused on the dining and nightlife scenes in New York City and was later acquired by digital media company Vox Media in 2013. In 2014, Leventhal co-founded the restaurant online reservation platform Resy, which was acquired by American Express in 2019.
After years of working in the restaurant industry, Leventhal gradually realized the limitations of traditional loyalty and reservation systems. Although they can bring short-term traffic, they cannot truly establish a "deeply connected" long-term relationship between restaurants and diners. Leventhal believes that in order for the restaurant industry to achieve this goal and achieve economic sustainability, it must ensure that restaurants can retain more commercial value and build a reward and loyalty ecosystem. This is where Blackbird came from and the problem the platform wants to solve.
One of Blackbird's main goals is to eliminate unnecessary intermediaries, including payment processors and other service providers that sit between restaurants and customers. Leventhal estimates that restaurants lose an average of 3% to 5% of their revenue to third parties, who don't create enough value. So by building a blockchain-based platform, Blackbird is trying to create a more direct connection between restaurants and customers, reducing costs and improving the overall dining experience.
Flynet is a transaction network created by Blackbird specifically for the restaurant industry. Blackbird will build a rewards and loyalty ecosystem based on it to optimize the connection between restaurants, restaurant customers and restaurant employees in the restaurant industry, and record any activities that occur between the two.
In contrast, user loyalty programs in the Web3 world seem to have not yet found a truly viable path. Starbucks Odyssey, the once highly anticipated NFT loyalty program of Starbucks, was eventually terminated in March 2024. The failure of the project reflects its complex participation process, vague value proposition, and the significant decline in mainstream users' interest and awareness of digital collections after the NFT craze subsided. This also shows that simply giving users the right to own NFTs is far from enough to establish a truly sticky loyalty system.
