The Rouge Project is a blockchain coupon platform built for the digital marketing world. Find out what that means today in our review.

What Is The Rouge Project?

The Rouge Project is a decentralized application on top of the Ethereum blockchain. The goal of the DApp is to optimize the world of digital coupons by reducing costs across the industry, reducing fraud, and introducing a coupon marketplace.

The ecosystem uses smart contracts and blockchain technology to reduce costs, reduce friction, and eliminate the need for trusted middlemen to produce non-falsifiable, non-reputable, and unique usage coupons.

Using The Rouge Project’s marketplace, publishers can monetize the advertisement of these coupons, while customers can exchange or resell their coupons.

Ultimately, The Rouge Project is bringing blockchain technology to the world of digital coupons. Digital coupons are a rapidly growing industry that has shown no signs of slowing down. As the whitepaper explains, “the coupon market is naturally becoming paperless and moving to the mobile/smartphone platform.” The Rouge Project wants to make the industry more efficient.

The Rouge Project’s whitepaper was published in July 2017.

What Problems Does The Rouge Project Seek To Solve?

The digital coupon industry is exploding with growth, but there are still some major problems in the industry. Here are some of the problems that The Rouge Project seeks to solve:

For brands and merchants (the organizations that issue coupons), it will be cheaper and easier to create and manage coupons with The Rouge Project; the platform, based on smart contracts, will allow brands and merchants to know valuable demographics information about who is acquiring and using each coupon. Each coupon will have individual tracking and cryptography attached, which makes accounting self-evident. It also makes the coupon fraud-resistant (it prevents someone from redeeming a coupon twice).

The general public can use The Rouge Project and its smart contracts to get strong guarantees on the marketing terms (i.e. the restrictions) and real value of coupons (in other words, they’ll stop seeing phrases like, “this coupon is not valid anymore”). Coupon users will also be able to access a secondary market where they can transfer or resell coupons they acquired when they did not wish to use them personally.

Content creators and publishers can benefit from the automatic, decentralized nature of the platform (there are no middlemen in the equation) to receive a higher share of revenue stream from coupon advertisements. By cutting out the middleman and reducing overhead costs, content creators and publishers can reap more benefits by advertising coupons on their platforms.

How Does The Rouge Project Work?

The Rouge Project, generally speaking, involves moving all digital coupons onto a blockchain. By moving coupons onto a blockchain, The Rouge Project can prevent fraud and eliminate middleman, which makes the digital coupon industry more efficient overall.

The entire platform is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain (it’s a decentralized app, or DApp).

As a coupon moves through The Rouge Project’s smart contracts and blockchain, it will progress through three states:

Free: The coupon has been issued but has not yet been acquired by any user.

Acquired: The coupon is associated with a user’s identity (the person who requested the coupon and currently owns the coupon).

Redeemed: The promotion or voucher has been consumed by the user.

While the coupon is in the “acquired” state, it can be transferred between users on The Rouge Project’s marketplace. Meanwhile, a coupon can only move from the acquired to redeemed state if it has the proper signature verifications from both the user and the issuer (the person who issued the coupon).

In this system, mass coupon fraud is virtually impossible.

The only way coupon fraud is possible is if there is a cheap and easy way to associate a fake user identity with a coupon and an automatic way to redeem the coupon. The Rouge Project plans to bundle reputation schemes into the platform for all three types of actors to discourage the three parties from engaging in any type of fraudulent activities.

How Does The Rouge Token Work?

The Rouge Project’s platform will revolve around the use of The Rouge Token, or RGE. This is an ERC20 compliant token that can be exchanged between all actors in the ecosystem, including issuers, publishers, and users.

Coupon issuers will use RGE to create and run marketing campaigns with complete control of the coupons issued and an atomic tracking of each coupon.

Each individual coupon will be issued with a “Reserve” value denominated in RGE. The issuer will pay that reserve value. The reserve value corresponds to the maximum bid that an issuer is willing to pay for the acquisition of the coupon by a user.

When the user acquires the coupon, the difference between the bid and the reserve is transferred back to the issuer. Smart contracts guarantee that the distribution of payout and commissions to the Rouge ecosystem will follow the rules agreed by issuers and publishers.

A 3% fee in RGE will be paid back to the issuer for every coupon redeemed, and a 2% fee will be charged by the platform in commission.

The RGE Token Crowdsale

The RGE token will have no pre-mine, nor will tokens be pre-attributed to any persons. The maximum possible supply (hard cap) is 1 billion. Any unsold units will be burned.

The crowdsale is scheduled for the end of September to October 2017, during which 60% of the RGE tokens (600 million) will be made available to users.

An additional reserve pool of 20% of the total supply (200 million RGE tokens) will be hard locked to a specific contract for one year after the end of the first crowdsale. A second reserve pool containing the same number of tokens will be locked for two years.

Who’s Behind The Rouge Project?

The Rouge Project’s whitepaper was published by Naira d’Arcollieres and Valentin D. Guillois. However, no further information about these two authors (and presumed company founders) is available in the whitepaper or through the Rouge.network website.

The Rouge Project appeared online in July 2017. By the end of 2017, the company plans to have a fully functional (although minimalistic) ecosystem as described above. The platform will be completed throughout 2018.

The Rouge Project Conclusion

The Rouge Project is a blockchain-based digital coupon management platform built on Ethereum as a decentralized app. The project aims to reduce fraud in the digital coupon industry, reduce costs, improve profitability for advertisers, and optimize the digital coupon industry as a whole. Visit Rouge.network to learn more about the project or to get ready for the upcoming ICO.