A Blockchain-Based Loyalty Program for a Smart City

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the development of a loyalty program based on blockchain, tailored for the application in smart cities. The goal is to propose a collaborative loyalty scheme that would enable consumers to collect loyalty points across a smart city, through traditional buying of products and services from partners, but also through participating in different collaborative activities, such as crowdsourcing, crowdsensing or crowdvoting. Additionally, the points can be spent across the smart city with any of the partners. In the paper, we give details on the business model for the proposed loyalty scheme and present a prototype of the implementation on the Hyperledger Fabric platform. We discuss the advantages of the proposed loyalty program and give implications for different stakeholders.