Blackbird, Blockchain Restaurant Loyalty App, Goes Live With Flynet Mainnet

Blackbird, the restaurant loyalty platform founded by Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, shared Thursday that its Flynet mainnet is live, bringing restaurant payments on-chain.

Flynet is a layer-3 blockchain based on top of Coinbase’s Base chain. Base, a layer-2 network, allows users to transact on top of Ethereum for faster and cheaper.

The team claims that having a layer-3 benefits the restaurant industry, because “by handling payments and loyalty programs entirely on Flynet, Blackbird eliminates traditional middlemen, reduces transaction costs, and introduces a new model for rewarding both diners and partners.”

Blackbird had previously released a payments platform, letting users pay for their meals with $FLY, the platform’s native token, which users could earn through the programs loyalty program by dining at participating restaurants, or by purchasing it in the Blackbird app using the USDC stablecoin.

With Flynet live, $FLY will be used in the same way, but now restaurants can use the token to pay platform fees as well. In addition, the team is releasing a new token, $F2, to be used for gas fees on the network.

The team said that they will airdrop 13% of the $F2 token supply to early users and restaurants, with distribution depending on certain activity metrics. The remaining 87% of $F2 will go to “insiders, the treasury, and we have another six seasons after this that we will allocate tokens to the participants,” Leventhal told CoinDesk in an interview.

According to the team, Blackbird has $85 million in funding with backers 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 currently is available in New York, San Francisco and Charleston, and lets diners earn rewards at some of their favorite restaurants. Leventhal told CoinDesk there are roughly 500 restaurants as part of their loyalty program.

“What we think we can do is build something where transactions become much more cost effective, and the levers that restaurants have to attract and retain customers will become vast,” Leventhal told CoinDesk on how he sees the restaurant industry and blockchain intersecting. “And those two things, more than anything else, is the reason why we’re building on-chain.”