Blockchain as Middleware for Exchange of Resources: The Cross-Company Loyalty Rewarding System Use Case

Loyalty programs that allow customers to collect loyalty points are popular means for customer relationship building. At the moment, such points can be collected and spent only within the same shop (or shops from the same consortium), which makes it only interesting for customers visiting that particular store frequently. However, especially with the increase of e-shops, customers easily switch between stores. With this new shopping behaviour, such programs are less attractive and as such become less effective, requiring a more novel approach. One possibility could be to allow customers to collect and spent loyalty points across stores. In fact, this is just one use case of a more general issue. There are multiple cases in which people receive (digital) resources from organizations or other parties and want to use or exchange them across other organizations or parties. In this paper, we propose a generic framework that allows customers to exchange resources across different parties. We propose to implement this framework with a blockchain-based solution, making the customers in full control and awareness of their available resources as well as creating a decentralized, trustable and safe environment. We present the major research questions, the general concepts of our generic framework, the proposed solution, and a proof of concept of this solution.