General Idea
Sandblock wants to help businesses and brands develop and improve their customer rewards, loyalty points and coupons system. Sandblock goal is to balance and redefine the relationship between businesses and their customers by building a decentralized protocol to define, measure and improve customer satisfaction in order to benefit both sides.
Blockchain Usage
The core protocol behind Sandblock is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Blockchain reliability plays a huge role in their ecosystem, as it assures that everyone is fairly rewarded. Moreover, the decentralization of the system and the transactions within it can be done without reliance on any third parties or intermediaries, which would add their fees, leading to higher prices or lower profits for the companies.
Sandblock Ecosystem
The main idea of the platform is to enable merchants and brands to reward their customers in a much more convenient and efficient way. They want to create a one system, which would be able to host all of the loyalty programs, reward systems and discount opportunities from all of the brands and private merchants interested in trying out this new technology. Sandblock will act as a base for all of these sellers to connect them with their customers and provide with tools and special tokens to reward them.
User Feedback
An interesting feature to assure the quality of all the merchants is the verified and blockchain-based user feedback system. The Satisfaction protocol gives merchants the capability to conduct research over the satisfaction of their customers, leading to the improvement of the overall service quality. Moreover, while looking for answers and potential improvements, merchants can send direct surveys to their customers and ask specific questions about the products or level of satisfaction. All of the user answers, comments, ratings and feedback can then be rewarded with loyalty points.
Loyalty Points
The most interesting feature of improving Loyalty Points system by Sandblock, is the fact that they are tradable and unified. However, to develop and focus on the “loyalty” part of such programs, which reward customers that are coming back and buying regularly from same merchants, each of them will be able to deploy their own Branded Tokens.
Each time a buyer participate in a loyalty program of particular merchant or brand, the tokens he gets can be withdrew, exchanged and then used to buy goods or services from other merchants within the ecosystem. That way, they eliminate problems and drawbacks of common loyalty programs, where points get lost after shop is closed or you have no use in them because they apply only to that one small local shop.
The Token
SATs are the main tokens used within the Sandblock ecosystem. They are based on Ethereum and have ERC-20 standard, which means you can store them alongside most of other ICO tokens in your Ethereum wallet of choice.
The Branded Tokens are the actual loyalty points and are created by merchants and companies. While creating their own token, they can set up their own exchange rates for SATs, as customers are able to exchange branded tokens and spend them in other shops within the ecosystem. SAT are tradable within public exchanges, but Branded Tokens are only tradable on the private Sandblock Marketplace.
ICO Phase
The pre-sale of SAT tokens starts at the 28th of February and will last until 11th of March. The initial exchange rate is set at 1ETH = 3750SAT.
The main ICO phase will then start at the 28th or March and end on 15th of April. You will be able to purchase the tokens for a higher price than during the pre-sale, as the exchange rate is set at 1ETH = 3000SAT. They aim to sell 19 500 000 tokens. The earlier you buy, the higher bonus you can expect. Within 2 weeks after the tokensale ends, they expect to be listed on some cryptocurrency exchanges.
The crowdsale is designed to have 50% of the token sold publicly during the ICO phase, while 8% are allocated to bounty campaigns and reward community members, who decided to support the platform from the very early stages and help in marketing it to others. The team behind Sandblock will get 12% of the tokens.
The Team
As an advantage acts the fact the Sandblock team consists mostly of programmers, developers and software engineers, which means that the technical side of the project is in good hands. There are developers with previous experience in blockchain technology and smart contract development. Apart from them, there are of course also people responsible for the marketing and finances of the platform, leading to a very complete team.
Final Thoughts
Sandblock seems to be very well prepared both from the logistic and technical sides. The sole idea of unifying and improving loyalty systems and customer rewards is very interesting and this is something that people can benefit from on the daily basis. Moreover, the merchants and brands will also get a set of very useful tools, which can greatly improve their sales and connect them better with their customers. The platform is designed quite well and they transparently explain all of their ideas and plans. The value and success of SAT tokens is mostly depended on the popularity of the platform. However, if they manage to encourage and invite some bigger brands it may turn out successful. With the recent popularization of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies, there will surely be merchants and brands interested in trying out these new technologies.
