Me Protocol reinvents loyalty rewards with AI

0:00I'm Ashen Addison from the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have Robert Wesley founder of me protocol here to talk about the AI economy AI agents blockchain and much more Robert welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time yeah thanks so much Austin for having me you're very welcome been following me protocol for more than a few months now and it just

0:25keeps getting better and better and the AI economy is further ingraining into blockchain and AI agents are getting more functionality uh it's no longer you know do inference with AI get a response and then have to do it all yourself uh they're actually starting to do things for you now which is 90% of the work um so I'm excited to dive into what me protocol has been working on uh in this

0:51aspect and uh then we can dive into all those topics but I'd love to start out by just hearing a little bit about me protocol and what you and your team have built uh and then we can dive into everything yeah yeah thanks so much for having us there's there's a lot to sort of go into so me protocol as started off about three years ago almost this is our

1:10third year anniversary and we were connecting rewards programs so like airline miles Hotel points Pizzeria discounts so we had this Vision that we if we connected rewards programs people could use their rewards on any product in any business from anywhere around the world and so we we started off trying to solve that problem and we designed our own automated Market maker so we

1:33developed a completely new approach to Market making uh we call it a dual value automated Market maker or DV amm uh and it connects all these rewards programs together um and so we built that we built a Marketplace we built our own rollup side chain um SDK to allow people to accept rewards on any platform uh anywhere in the world and uh this year as you sort of alluded to in the opening

2:01uh we're releasing our first AI agent that will control rewards for businesses and consumers it's very cool and rewards are great of course I feel like the traditional uh rewards industry um it everyone wants rewards but it's about maximizing the value for people and making sure that you're not accumul spending years accumulating some points that either then become devalued or you

2:28never use them um or you can only spend it on this one thing that you didn't really want um how are you guys revolutionizing that to make it more efficient and and effective yeah so rewards have been around for a long time and or sort of most accustomed to airline miles or hotel points or cash back from credit cards um but the general Trends right now as you you mentioned people don't

2:57really like these acral programs where people just earn miles over a period of time and it's kind of like the business's um lock in so with these types of Industries with Airlines for example there's no switching cost so you can go from one airline to another and there's like no cost to you as a as a consumer and so airlines in the very beginning they try to give you rewards

3:21to actually say hey thank you for flying with us we hope your experience was wonderful here's a gift uh and now the rewards programs have kind of transitioned to time into this hey fly with us again because then maybe in four or five or six more Journeys then you can actually get something for your rewards and that's kind of how they they try to like lock you into to the brand

3:42um but consumers are not sort of buying that so like people in their 70s um about 90% of them are involved in some sort of Rewards program with Airlines and now if you look at the younger Generations it's dropping down in the 60% and and even down in the 50s so people want to be rewarded instantly they want they feel like they've earned these rewards they want to actually get

4:07something useful for them and so what we do is we allow any business to create rewards that you can immediately use now you don't have to wait you don't have to acrew these rewards you you get receive a reward and you can use it across any product that you want to from any brand that's connected to us uh and so that's like the way we do that I think is

4:28really special in the market um um and so yeah I think consumers are are pretty excited about what we're putting together mhm and traditionally people normally if they're trying to get a lot of rewards they're saving up for a flight or a hotel um do you still see that as depending on how many people are traveling or you know maybe they only travel once a year or once every few

4:52years is that where the focus still is um or is it on shopping and everyday expenses that most people have yeah so in in the travel and Hospitality sector you have like the most adoption so everyone there Airlines hotels they all know rewards and travelers that are flying or staying the places they also understand rewards and in other sectors like retail it's not as common so

5:20sometimes people are signed up to all these uh customer programs or rewards programs and they don't even realize that they're a part of it I think I read a statistic that people in the US at least are um generally on average a part of like 17 different rewards programs loyalty programs and they only realize that they're maybe enrolled in a handful and so the what whereas there

5:46there are lots of examples of rewards programs in retail there's just like a disconnect for how people use those um and I think there's a lot of reasons for that but we're we're also working with retail Brands so product Brands fashion brands Brands to allow them to really easily create a rewards programs that people can actually use and understand and

6:08immediately um find Value in and so that's what we've done so can you talk about whichever is easiest first either the business side or the the consumer side uh say there's a business that already has a a loyalty plan loyalty program maybe it's not that good but how do these players come into me protocol and and make it

6:35better yeah so if you have a Rewards program you just connect via API uh we also have an SDK so it's like a kind of stripe for rewards so so you can install this just as you would stripe for payments and you can accept rewards from any business directly on your your own property your own site um and so if you have a r program you just plug in play we have you can sync inventories and

7:03things like that it's kind of boring maybe for your audience but like these are these are sort of important for for businesses to adopt uh a lot of the time as you know from your experience in blockchain we come up with these like cool cool technologies that no one can adopt because it's just too complicated to figure out or explain yeah and so we spend a lot we spend a lot of

7:24time like allowing like normal businesses to connect to this without even needing to know about block chains or tokens so everyone's like actually set up on a wallet everything's tokenized um but unless they ask we don't even like describe that most of the time um and I know for like Gans that's a that's like you know get the get the garlic out um but at the same

7:49time it's really real when you're trying to to bring large scale adoption to to the sector um so we're really focus on that and also from the customer side so the customer side the customers don't care about the rewards very much like they don't they don't care if it's a token or if it's on some some other database somewhere um they just want to like okay i' I've done something I

8:14earned a reward what can I do with it and if you can't if you can't show me what I can do with that reward like immediately then I'm GNA lose interest and I'm gonna forget that I I even did that and so that's what we do so we have like a Marketplace there anyone that's been given a reward from any of the brands that work with us they can immediately always see all the products

8:36and services they can use the rewards on now so they don't need to go out and like search for how they can use the reward they can immediately see what they can get now definitely I feel like you know if you're one of those instant gratification people that you you get a small reward and you use it you're probably not going to get as much as you would if you try to spend spend a year

8:59uh accumula in points so that you could save up for for something big um and so H how does that exactly work if you you know there are people that want to spend their rewards and loyalty right away um can you do you know partial uh acral to to something or small Rewards or you know how can you actually make that turnaround time really quick for accumulating rewards and then spending

9:26them yeah so I mean when we work with the a business and let's say they have they don't have a Rewards program so like half the businesses don't have rewards programs and they're just setting one up so we allow them to spin up a Rewards program like within a day essentially I mean it could be even quicker than that if they they move fast but it it takes them a little bit of

9:48time just to integrate their products and it's automated and then they have to like tell their customers that they have this new program and that's all they have to do we we take care of like the heavy lifting on everything else MH um but when they're telling their customers they have this Rewards program they provide need to provide some level of incentive for them to use it so we

10:10talked to them about how many rewards to give and because we can see the value of everything in the network in the ecosystem we can say okay if you give them this a number of your rewards they can get a discount out a bottle of prco or they can get some earrings or or whatever it is so maybe try to give at least this number of rewards yeah and that I think that's that's kind of our

10:34our way of feeling feeling it through with them to develop a strategy that that people are interested in we also have ways to you can earn rewards too so there's a whole like built-in bounties okay so people know about bounties and web 3 and blockchain and so we have a bounties module that's actually built into the protocol itself um and so every time there's a

10:55transaction a little bit of the transaction occurs to a bounty and we release bounties automatically and then people can do whatever the brand is interested in writing a product review or following them on social media or whatever like a quest you know but it's a not like a quest just like an activity that you can do um and then you can earn rewards and so that's built in through

11:20the system so if you don't have enough rewards to get something you want you can always do something to earn those those extra rewards that's a nice touch because traditionally you pretty much have to spend you know it's it's been per $1 you get one point or you know and all of a sudden you're not everyone's going to be spending $10,000 to to get 10,000 points

11:44and and these Brands might want help on their socials or or some kind of other activity and there isn't really a system laid out to reward people for contributing you know incentivizing them you know they have a little card on the desk at the front of the store that says you know give us a Google review uh but like you know that takes time I I want to be rewarded uh for that and I want to

12:09be make an honest review as well uh but doing a lot of work without uh any reward nowadays with microtransactions blockchain uh and tokenization micro payments and micro uh Loyalty Rewards are possible and I feel like more businesses should be adopting this yeah absolutely I I mean what what we're what we're putting into place now is is going to really change loyalty like hardcore and

12:37when we start talking about the AI later we can talk about like how how that future might look like uh from our perspective but it's going to change dramatically and it's going to benefit everyone so the businesses themselves they want touch points with the consumer so let's say you're a business and you you sell me a shirt and maybe I don't come and buy from you again for a whole

12:59another year uh or I maybe even never buy from you again so my purchase frequency is very very infrequent so if I have a way to like touch you in in between that um then I'm going to pay for that and so if it means like giving you Rewards or encouraging you somehow through that then uh they're willing to to spend on that willing to spend on your engagement

13:25and that's good for you as a consumer that means you're able to generate more rewards and you're able to like increase your purchasing power and and your like agency and as like consumers one of the trends that we've been always looking for as consumers is this way to get generate more agency it's like why are we sometimes feel like we're we're the one we're being tricked by advertising

13:47all the time you know Corporate America is like just like fooling us to buy these kind of things or whatever and we don't have enough communication or or way to do that so sometimes we rant and control on social media um but there are other ways that we can engage with with businesses um and so rewards are like a tool for that engagement it's not like

14:10the way to engage but it is a tool to help engage and that's like I think businesses and brands are are really looking for this definitely and can you talk more about how the AI part fits into this yeah so we were we were thinking about when do we start talking a lot about our our Ai and and actually we started off our company my a company behind the me protocols called my Ai and

14:38founded this in even even before the me protocol project and we're building a an AI agent for travel and this was back before chat GPT and like all of the generative AI hype that came out we were using different methods enriching feature vectors and stuff like that that um maybe maybe it's like obsolete now um but we were doing this then and while we

15:05were doing that we saw we were like okay why doesn't people why don't people answer our emails and like what about this investor not answering our emails and stuff it was during covid so no one was investing in TR ball at the time yeah no M no matter like how cool what we were doing was uh just people weren't weren't interested um so like man I could just I wish I just give them some

15:27money or reward them for answering my email M um or they can just give it to their friends or something and that's how we we sort of got down the the rewards Rabbit Hole um but we always had like AI as part of the project so AI to begin with was like a recommendation engine so we wanted to be able to because the problem with rewards is you have to go out and

15:51figure out what you can spend them on and you don't know like what you can afford and so the first first AI project that we did project overlay was this recommendation engine using machine learning and some AI techniques um then we needed to before you do like Advanced AI agent stuff um you need to like have the proper infrastructure in place for the agents to actually do

16:19something I think if you look out at the market right now there's a lot of this hype around AI agents um but a lot of these agents don't have the rails um to to actually do that much and that's why you see all these agent projects that are just as much of crap because they can't actually they can't actually do that much yeah and so be before we were saying okay we're going

16:40to do this AI agent stuff we needed to develop an infrastructure that the agent can actually utilize to do more advanced work with rewards and so our the vision that we were seeing there was a vision where you have an AI agent that's interfacing with businesses so Brands uh in order to screen offers for you to allow you to always know how you can spend rewards to automate how you

17:08spend rewards and also to to manage your purchasing power so it's like if I if I buy $10,000 with a Rolexes a year I want my agent out there hustling for me getting rewards in from CTI and and all these other businesses uh that I might be interested in buying their products for um I live in Vienna Austria and I also saw okay it is

17:36absolutely possible for me to walk down the main shopping street in Vienna Austria and have businesses there actually airdropping me rewards um now none of that's possible currently um not just because the AI agents aren't as sophisticated as they will be in a year uh but because they just can't interface with the brand in that way MH and so we' built this whole

18:02rewards infrastructure this rewards layer that allows AI agents to automate the entire process for rewards so the business can Target customers can qualify and Target customers at the right time with the right offers and the right rewards and then the consumers themselves they don't have to spend that much time dealing with rewards anyway it's the agent

18:25that's doing most of the work with rewards and like you know like I said in the beginning rewards are great uh but only as much as we can use something with them the agent is is just working on our behalf there yeah um and so we have two projects that are releasing this year one is called Agent me and this is the consumer agent and so it will it will start automating

18:49transactions for you using rewards uh and and acting on your behalf as an inter lur like a um um uh intermediary between businesses and we have what's called um head agent which is another one of our projects this year uh that will relas in like maybe third or fourth quarter that allows external AI agents to to interface and connect with our

19:16infrastructure so they can perform operations with rewards um themselves like in an easier way um and so that's we think this is going to completely change Rewards um I I mean I feel that when I looking at the rewards future I see kind of two scenarios so one is a scenario rewards rewards just die completely um just like no longer relevant or one in which rewards become

19:45like a common currency for for AI agents and we're betting on the the second part we want to turn rewards into a common currency and so we think we're like really uniquely positioned with regards to to our approach and our Tech um for enabling that future that's very cool uh I'm looking forward to seeing more real functionality in AI agents and yeah if

20:12they can maximize the effectiveness of any rewards that I have that would be great uh um I'll get them on that right away I think delegating uh work and uh to AI agents is something that people once once that functionality is live people are going to be uh realizing how they couldn't live without it uh you know once it once it happens so looking forward to that um and and what's the

20:39status of businesses onboarding people accumulating uh rewards where exactly is the platform at with all of that yeah so we we launched our Marketplace we did a soft launch of the marketplace last summer for the first cohort of of businesses um it worked well we you know we it's a very complicated set of Technologies when you connect a Rewards program and you want the rewards

21:06to interoperate or be usable across the system it sounds very easy but it's actually a very hard problem um and so we had to build the protocol which does this interoperation which Brokers the transactions for for you to directly use your reward on a product from another business and we build a Marketplace um which is like how you actually interface and and interact as a

21:32consumer um then we have a whole another product which is a a control center for businesses that they can launch their whole Rewards program that they can in integrate all of their e-commerce platforms and uh crms and everything um and so all of that was finished last year we did the launch and now we have 15 Brands um launching rewards with us to to their over two

21:57million customers um so we have big Partners Bank of Georgia farfetch uh we just got investment from the travel sector we want a massive travel Tech competition beat out several hundred startups from around the world um for like really what is the the Next Generation travel Tech um and so we won that so we have now backing from a Consortium of of travel companies Hotel

22:23groups um and and so that all that's launched we have the SD K which is launching this quarter uh so right around the time our token is launching we have this SDK that's that stripe for rewards and so you can actually accept rewards on any platform from any business that's connected to us directly on your your site so something like that doesn't exist in the market being able

22:48to have like you ow a widget like a intercom widget or whatever where you can just or like a PayPal button or just like immediately you can pay with rewards from from other businesses um so we're we're super excited about that we built it for the travel sector uh because we're pushing hard in travel and they have like all this Dynamic inventory so the hotel

23:13accommodations are changing all the time the flights are changing all the time so they need a way to to do this very dynamically um yeah so it's going to be a big year for us we expect around 60 businesses to on board with us this year um and yeah we have three three new product releases this this quarter so we're cooking very exciting and you said uh there's an upcoming token launch as

23:41well can you talk about the Mi protocol token and the the utility that it provides inside of the ecosystem in the marketplace yeah sure so we do have a token it's a utility token it's called Meep protocol token or Meep magic Eden came and stole our our ticker it was me me protocol me Marketplace whatever and they came in rebranded and stole it but that's okay

24:07um and it's going to be in first quarter so looks like next month when the token launch will happen you stay tuned on on our social media we'll we'll do an announcement of the specific date you can come in uh the token utility is in there's twofold so one is it serves as a universal reward in the system uh so any one that has our token can use it across

24:30products from any business that's connected so actually is a universal reward um so that's an important functionality for it every every reward is backed by our token in terms of value um and we have a um a unique as I mentioned before automated Market maker it's called a dual value amm and nothing like this exists on the market as well it's it's completely unique and um if

24:57you know how amm work you know they have liquidity pools these pools and there's a pair pair of tokens or multiple tokens and the me token is the the paired token in these pools it's the liquidity and it's the value that's transferred in the system so the protocol the amm this brokering of transactions uh doesn't function without the me protocol token uh so that's it's we're already

25:24using it it's already it's already used and so every every time that a business on boards with us we have to buy this token off the market they have to buy it off the market okay that's good to know and with the the launch of the token and just getting people involved in actually getting loyalty points uh what is the best way to get started on that yeah so uh follow us on Twitter me

25:55protocol we can I guess drop the link afterwards um but you should you should have a an onboarding link there for how you can set up come and register for the marketplace we're going to have a link uh where you can come in uh will'll give you some free rewards so you can make a transaction you can get something for free in the system you can kind of try

26:16come out and try try it with the the initial brands that are on boarding there so I think that's that's sort of like the best way to see it and and experience it it and we'll we'll have different we'll have different um competitions over the the course of the next month so you can come come in and win different things by trying out the Marketplace sounds good I I can leave a

26:38link to the socials the Twitter you mentioned and the platform in the show notes below and uh I'm looking forward to seeing the growth of this uh I'm one of those people that has a lot of loyalty points that are unspent uh looking for ways to uh maximize efficiency on that and it I'm looking forward to seeing how the AI agents may be able to help with that so I'll

27:02definitely be following along and I would love to follow up with you again as the platform grows and the AI agent part comes closer and and the token launch and everything i' love to do that in the near future Robert oh you're welcome to look we have a massive road map here we've been delivering on this for the past two years uh and we've de we've delivered

27:26quite a a huge amount of innovation and this is just the beginning you just just stay tuned this year so those of you that are interested in the token you'll also be become aware of all the the announcements we'll have over this year we have a new brand on boarding like every week with us uh and so these are new new people on boarding into to crypto um that don't even realize that

27:51they're on boarding into crypto uh so it's it is an exciting time to be I think in this sector to be in web3 to be crypto um and I think I I really I love I love good use cases for for blockchain and I think we have like an extremely strong like sustainable use case here rewards are not going anywhere it's a massive market and we're just making it easier for these businesses to on board

28:18into Crypton very exciting thank you so much for your time Robert awesome thanks so much for having me