Blackbird, the loyalty platform at the restaurant founded by the co-founder of Resy and Eater, Ben Leventhal, shared Thursday that his Mainnet Flynet was live, bringing payments of chain restaurants.
Flynet is a bed 3 -based blockchain based on the top of the Coinbase base chain. Base, a Layer-2 network, allows users to transform over Ethereum for faster and cheaper.
The team claims that having a layer 3 benefits the catering industry, because “by managing payments and loyalty programs entirely on Flynet, Blackbird eliminates traditional intermediaries, reduces transaction costs and introduces a new model to reward guests and partners.”
Blackbird had previously published a payment platform, allowing users to pay their meals with $ fly, the native token of the platform, which users could gain by the program loyalty program by dinner in participating restaurants or by buying it in the Blackbird application using the Stablecoin USDC.
With Flynet Live, $ fly will be used in the same way, but now restaurants can also use the token to pay the platform fees. In addition, the team publishes a new token, $ F2, to be used for gas costs on the network.
The team said they would have deposited 13% of the supply of $ F2 tokens to first users and restaurants, with a distribution according to certain activity measures. The remaining 87% of F2 will go to the “Initiates, to the Treasury, and we still have six seasons after that that we will allocate tokens to the participants,” Leventhal in Coindesk told an interview.
According to the team, Blackbird has $ 85 million funding with donors from Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), Coinbase, Spark Capital and American Express. In 2023, A16Z collected more than $ 24 million for the platform in an A series.
Blackbird is currently available in New York, San Francisco and Charleston, and allows guests to win awards in some of their favorite restaurants. Leventhal told Coindesk that there were around 500 restaurants as part of their loyalty program.
“What we think we can do is build something where transactions become much more profitable, and the levers that restaurants must attract and hold customers will become large,” Leventhal at Coindesk told the way he sees the catering industry and the blockchain crossing. “And these two things, more than anything else, is the reason why we build in a chain.”
Read more: Blackbird, web startup of the co-founder of Resy, wants the guests to pay for meals in crypto