Can your public blockchain handle over 10 million transactions a day? Minter can!

5 min readDec 31, 2020

Our recap of 2020. A non-chronological look at how the ideology and vision of Minter evolved while the whole planet was in quarantine.

This article will be most interesting for those who have never heard of Minter. And to those who continues following our journey throughout these challenging times, we want to say a big ‘thank you’ and ask you to share this post wherever you can so that it reaches as many people as possible.

So in late December, our network delivered over 7 million transfers in 24 hours. A giant leap from 100,000 transactions that were made back in April this year! Quick calculations show that we can process even 10 million daily — and more. That’s what you can see in the headline, but how did we end up here and what milestones did we reach along the way?

This year, we found a niche that we aim to fill by solving the problems that both businesses and their customers have. But first, let’s answer this: What is Minter?

Minter is a global rewards and loyalty points network powered by a fast blockchain. Any brand, community, or blogger can create their own coins and launch their reward or loyalty system in minutes. By “coins,” we mean loyalty points, rewards, cashbacks, discounts, credits, and so on. They can be transferred between users, exchanged for one another, or spent on goods and services.

Testing the Ground

Our pick of a target market was well informed as our core team’s R&D office did several in-depth studies. Our legal team prepared opinion on regulatory matters and concerns associated with the issuance of loyalty points and rewards in the U.S. and E.U. We released broad research about how some of the world’s largest brands use rewards in their operations. We also made a comparative analysis of the popular SaaS solutions in the field of customer loyalty management software. On top of that, we posted a guide that explains the difference between ‘loyalty points’ and ‘rewards’ and helps you find out which one you actually need. Last but not least, we published findings from the study that’s based on data from Visa and currently rank first for the “how to increase loyalty 2021” keyword in Google.

In addition, we designed loyalty concepts for Reddit and Twitter. The first was included by the social media giant as one of the candidate solutions for its upcoming system.

Ecosystem

There are three key products we’ve developed that fulfill almost 100% of the needs that businesses have in terms of rewards and loyalty points.

Pinpon

Pinpon helps brands launch rewarding interactions across all social networks and instant messengers in just a few minutes. They can use an intuitive builder to create a responsive page with one of the following types of interaction: giveaway, poll, quiz, puzzle, survey, or opinion.

Users get points for taking part in each interaction. Blockchain-based, anti-cheating protection reduces the efforts of fraudsters to zero. Each point represents a lottery ticket that increases the chance of winning. Users are motivated to share interactions with friends to increase the likelihood of success because they get additional, referral points. Meanwhile, brands get automated viral reach.

You can sign up now to get free pre-launch access.

Killer feature: fairness, integrity, transparency.

Minter Wallet (beta)

Minter Wallet helps brands engage their audience in promotions as fast as possible. With Minter Wallet, it will take customers as little as one minute to join a campaign. Moreover, they won’t need to download or install anything, figure out how blockchain works, or have any special skills.

The wallet’s main feature is that you can send and receive coins not only to addresses on Minter but also to regular e-mail addresses, even if the receiver hasn’t signed up for Minter Wallet yet. The recipient can claim their transfer within 30 days simply by logging in to the wallet via a secure one-time link straight from their inbox.

Killer feature: an e-mail address is all you need to get and spend.

Minter Bonus (alpha)

Minter Bonus is a platform where small businesses can create their bonus system.

Launch in five minutes
No special knowledge needed
No plastic cards, identification only by phone number
No need to download or installing anything, all features are available on the mobile-ready website
Sending bonuses to the client via SMS
Bonuses charged by an employee via a QR code that any standard camera (or scanner app) can read
Unique name of your bonuses that can’t be faked (created on the Minter blockchain)
No one can tamper with the bonuses
The owner can analyze all transactions in a simple interface: who accrued the points to whom, when and for what purpose (on which goods/services they were spent)
Bonuses can be sent to friends

Killer feature: near-zero costs for the owner.

Who’s Paying?

To make these loyalty points and rewards absolutely and instantly liquid, we are currently working on the Minter Hub sidechain that will become a ‘bridge’ between Minter and other leading blockchains (such as Ethereum). It will allow users to move coins between the networks, at the same time enjoying the benefits of Minter that you won’t find in competitors: less than $0.01 in fees and five seconds in time. No one will wait tens of minutes or even hours at the checkout to redeem their loyalty points and rewards.

Minter 2.0, a major upgrade that is set to go live at some point in Q1 next year, will see the arrival of non-backed custom coins (any entrepreneur/company can have its own!) — implemented similarly to Uniswap pools — that users will also be able to pay transaction fees with.

Even if only a small group needs the points of a little-known business, those points will still have demand if both the seller and the buyer are okay with the price. The second party to the transaction is not the buyer themselves, but a blockchain-powered smart contract that accepts points from one system and accrues points from the other using the reserve, which, for example, had been topped up by the previous seller. The power of pairs is that they can build chains, creating the same network effect where even the most ‘worthless’ points can be exchanged for something ‘delicious.’ The only question is the price and number of pairs that will take part in the transaction. If you think of it, this mechanic reminds of the one red paperclip story.

Learn More

As a bonus, here’s the list of resources that will help you better understand Minter and where it’s headed: