Blackbird, the restaurant loyalty platform established by resy and eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, shared Thursday that Flynet Mainnet is live, bringing restaurant payments to the chain.
Flynet is a layer-3 blockchain based on top of The base chain of coinbase. Base, a Layer-2 networkAllows users to transact the top of Ethereum for faster and cheaper.
The team says that having a layer-3 benefits the restaurant industry, because “by handling payments and loyalty programs in full on Flynet, Blackbird removes traditional middlemen, reduces transaction costs, and introduces a new model for rewarding both eateries and partners.”
Blackbird had Previously released a payment platform.
With Flynet Live, the $ fly will be used in the same way, but now restaurants can use the token to pay platform fees too. In addition, the team releases a new token, $ F2, which will be used for network gas fees.
The team said they airdrop 13% of the $ F2 token supply to the first users and restaurants, with distribution depending on some scale of activity. The remaining 87% of $ F2 will go to “insider, the Treasury, and we have another six periods after we allocate tokens to participants,” Leventhal told CoinDesk in an interview.
According to the team, Blackbird has $ 85 million in funding to supporters from Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), Coinbase, Spark Capital, and American Express. In 2023, A16Z raised more than $ 24 million For the platform in a series a round.
Blackbird is currently available in New York, San Francisco and Charleston, and lets eaters earn rewards at some of their favorite restaurants. Leventhal told CoinDesk that there were about 500 restaurants as part of their loyalty program.
“What we think we can do is build something in which transactions become more effective in cost, and levers that restaurants need to attract and maintain customers will be broad,” Leventhal told CoinDesk how he saw the restaurant industry and intersecting blockchain. “And those two things, more than anything else, are why we build on-chain.”
Read more: Blackbird, Web3 Startup from Resy Co-Founder, eateries want to pay for crypto meals
