From: thepipeline_xyz
Several projects are leveraging blockchain technology to innovate in the retail and restaurant sectors, aiming to create more engaging, transparent, and community-driven experiences. These initiatives focus on improving user acquisition, customer loyalty, and direct engagement for businesses, while offering novel reward mechanisms and enhanced privacy for consumers.
Bougie: Mobile-Native E-commerce Platform
Bougie is a mobile-native e-commerce platform designed to foster more meaningful relationships between brands and consumers by harnessing the power of tokenized incentives 00:27:14. The team consists of fashion and tech industry players, including Lee and Naomi Giapis of Vegas N Brands, who bring decades of experience in fashion, cosmetics, and social media marketing 00:27:30.
Addressing Industry Friction
The platform addresses the difficulty of buying good clothes on a phone, where users often navigate spammy listings or numerous retailer-specific apps 00:28:34. Bougie solves this by handling every part of the customer purchase journey—from discovery and curation to checkout—all within the app 00:29:06. It utilizes a Tinder-style interface, allowing customers to indicate product preferences with a simple gesture, which in turn provides valuable preference data 00:29:15.
Tokenized Rewards System
A key innovation is its tokenized rewards point system, which enables brands to execute direct-to-consumer campaigns tailored to their specific needs and profit margins 00:29:31. Building rewards points on the blockchain allows for features like swaps between different brands’ reward points 00:29:45. This gamified approach aims to increase stickiness and boost conversions, creating a “virtuous cycle” where users earn by swiping, providing more data, leading to better recommendations, and ultimately more purchases and app engagement 00:30:02.
Market Opportunity and Strategy
Bougie enters the market at a time when ultra-fast fashion companies like Shein and Temu are facing regulatory scrutiny over customs loopholes, suggesting a return to domestic buying for consumers 00:31:31. The project emphasizes the importance of a mobile-first, incentivized, and gamified shopping experience to meet consumer expectations 00:32:27.
The business model includes earning from display ads, sponsored listings, and commissions from sales made within the app 00:32:42. Initial audience targeting leverages Vegas Nay’s extensive social media following, including 6 million Instagram followers and over 200 million additional reach through her network, along with incentivizing referrals 00:32:58. The blockchain element is fully abstracted from the user, allowing for infinite scalability and enabling any company to create customized reward programs and secondary markets for points 00:36:08.
Chipped: Wearable Tech for Social Engagement
Chipped offers an innovative wearable technology solution using NFC chips embedded in press-on nails that link directly to aggregated social media profiles 00:41:18. The goal is to connect web2 and web3 identities in one place, allowing users to share their profiles by simply tapping a nail to a phone 00:41:27.
Bridging Digital and Real-World Interactions
This full-stack brand is built on crypto rails with non-invasive wearable hardware 00:41:34. It supports both web2 and web3 profiles using Privy sign-in, enabling the creation of “proof of IRL credentials” and allowing users to add notes and pictures to their connections 00:41:50. Every connection made contributes points to a user’s onchain identity reputation, fostering an “anti-sybil network of real users and wallets through high-signal actions” 00:42:28.
Scaling and Market Strategy
Chipped has seen significant traction, with over 1,500 active chips and 300 app users, and has been featured by major publications like Paris Hilton, Forbes, and Vogue Business 00:43:03. The company aims for global expansion, particularly in the APAC market, recognizing the strong nail culture and openness to technology there 00:44:07. The total addressable market for wearable tech is projected to reach $161 billion by 2033 00:44:21. Chipped is filing patents for its full-stack solution, combining hardware and software 00:44:39. The project emphasizes that while it doesn’t need crypto, crypto needs chipped to bring real users onchain through real-world actions 00:46:36.
Nanos: Realigning Advertising Incentives
Nanos is a platform that enables any brand to pay any user when they establish an engagement or perform a useful activity for that brand 01:19:07. The core idea is to fund users’ first crypto wallets, reducing the typical friction and financial risk associated with initial web3 experiences 01:19:31. By offering rewards like 10 for brand engagement, Nanos aims to create a positive first impression of web3 for consumers 01:20:02.
A New Approach to Advertising
The platform focuses on the trillion-dollar advertising industry, believing that aligning incentives and building communities, as seen in web3, can be applied to traditional marketing in an understandable way 01:21:35. Nanos seeks to address the issue of wasted ad spend ($120 billion annually) and the challenge of reaching real people amidst increasing bot activity 01:22:20.
Nanos introduces “cost per result” marketing, where brands only pay when users perform defined valuable actions 01:23:41. This model ensures users are rewarded, brands get desired outcomes, and real people are connected to real brands, driving real revenue 01:23:51. The platform abstracts away the crypto elements, allowing users to earn and spend money without realizing they are using blockchain rails 01:24:06. For example, a user might earn $5 from Sunglass Hut for trying on glasses and posting a picture online, then spend it instantly with a linked debit card 01:24:15.
Leveraging Web Proofs and Scalability
Nanos uses web proofs, including onchain and offchain verifications, primarily focusing on offchain for real-world relevance 01:25:08. This allows for “vampire attacks” on Web2 companies by identifying valuable customers (e.g., a Robinhood user with $100k in trades) and offering variable rewards based on their value or influence 01:29:05. The blockchain enables faster, easier, and more global payments without jurisdictional limitations or extensive KYC, bypassing traditional payment rails 01:27:51.
A beta launch onboarded over 250,000 “people” (not just wallets), resulting in over 3 million brand outcomes for companies like Uber and The North Face across 900,000 missions 01:26:16. The project paid out approximately $4 million in testnet USDC to demonstrate the process 01:26:34.
Plato: Gamified Restaurant Engagement
Plato is a platform designed to acquire repeat customers for restaurants by making in-person dining social and engaging through gamification 02:52:46. For consumers, it offers a social “foot map” and a streak mechanism to encourage daily app engagement, along with weekly quests that incentivize checking in and spending at local restaurants 02:53:36. Users can also share their dining experiences directly on social media from the app 02:53:51.
Solving Restaurant Acquisition Challenges
The platform addresses a significant problem for restaurants: the inability to track clicks to in-person purchases from digital ad campaigns, making platforms like Google Ads ineffective 02:54:11. Existing loyalty programs are often clunky and require physical devices at the cashier 02:54:46. Plato aims to bridge this gap in the $7 trillion US retail market 02:55:04.
Community-Led Merchant Acquisition
Plato leverages a “fat token” utility, allowing users to stake tokens at IRL restaurants to signal which establishments are “primed for onboarding” 02:56:20. This staking mechanism creates a bounty system, motivating community members to onboard restaurants, effectively establishing a decentralized merchant acquisition mechanism that scales faster and more cheaply than competitors 02:56:42. Local city DAOs give the community ownership and control over Plato’s expansion within their area 02:56:06.
The ultimate vision is a “universal Dining Dollars” system, where users can preload spending amounts into Plato to receive perks and discounts from participating merchants, who in turn pay lower processing fees than traditional POS charges 02:56:34. The app is permissionless, allowing users to check in and prove dining at any of the 15 million supported restaurants worldwide 02:57:07. The more a user spends, the more “fat token” rewards they earn, with a rigorous OCR model and manual checks in place to prevent cheating with receipts 03:00:23. Plato tracks user spending habits to categorize them (e.g., “Sushi connoisseur” levels), allowing restaurants to target specific customer profiles 03:06:50.
Kido: Augmented Reality Gaming for Brands
Kido and its project, The Particle Inc, are transforming the world into a “digital playground” through augmented reality (AR) gaming 02:38:18. The project aims to solve the lack of true player immersion, low long-term retention in AR games, and imprecise real-world interactivity 02:38:26.
Immersive AR with AI and Blockchain
Kido’s patented technology blends AR, AI, and blockchain to enable “contextual awareness, personalization, and ever-evolving narratives with real-time responsiveness” 02:40:23. This creates “emotionally connected consumers,” who are more likely to contribute, spend, and remain loyal 02:40:37.
The user experience involves building relationships with NFTs that react emotionally and physically based on player interactions 02:41:02. The digital world learns and grows based on the player’s environments, and gameplay evolves continuously based on real-world locations, creating limitless adventures 02:41:10. Examples include building custom villages that travel with the user, tagging graffiti messages for others, achieving quests with real-world objects, and battling an “ink army” 02:41:28.
Market Readiness and Growth
AR adoption is seen as inevitable, with 74% of Gen Z using daily AR apps and 1.73 billion AR-enabled smartphones existing today 02:42:01. Kido is positioned at the forefront of this market, having secured monthly licensing revenue and multiple partnerships 02:42:34. They have a unique web3 user acquisition pipeline, including onboarding thousands through a Las Vegas experience and an upcoming Smart City partnership expecting over 11 million visitors annually 02:42:51.
Key achievements include selling out their Genesis AR collection in 90 minutes during a bear market, securing deals with MGM Casino group and Alium Smart City, and launching AR-activated merchandise with unique NFT attributes 02:43:11. The blockchain integration extends beyond just NFTs; gameplay data is stored on the blockchain, and future plans include giving users the option to store and monetize their personal environmental data on the blockchain via AI agents 02:50:41.