Earlier this month I once again found myself heading across the world, leaving Blighty for Down Under for a little over a week with the Wilson family and Incent Loyalty. Here’s what I got up to.

As will now be clear from the recent Gfinity announcement, Incent is shifting gears and is now in a position to roll out its software to major business partners. You can find out more about the tech we’ve been developing on the blog, but suffice to say that the team have done an awesome job. The really big deal from my perspective is the banking integration. This sounds totally unsexy but has some massive implications. Basically, once you’re signed up to the platform, you don’t have to worry about collecting rewards from participating stores at all — you just spend on your credit or debit card, and the points are sent to your Incent account automatically. You might not even know the store offers Incent — it doesn’t matter. At a stroke, this does away with all of the plastic reward cards that everyone hates and generally forgets about. How many mainstream loyalty schemes even offer that? Add the Open Value element of Incent — a transparent, fixed supply of crypto tokens — and you have a very powerful model.

Alongside the tech and business dev, there’s a role for a major piece of work to position Incent as thought leaders in the space: guys who have not just the tech but the vision for something truly meaningful. That was the immediate reason for my trip. We’d be working on a book that articulates what has happened to the world over the last 30 years, where we could be heading next, and what we can do about it. In eight days.

I suggested to Rob that it might be a good idea for me to fly business class; I figured that way I’d be fresher when I landed, firing on all eight cylinders and able to make more rapid progress in the short time we had to work on the book. He managed to explain his own position on this idea in no more than two words, and so it was that I booked a seat with Thai Airways and spent a delightful 24 hours in cattle class, much of it next to a woman who turned out to be Quite Ill and inevitably passed the baton on to me. Sharing is Caring.

‘Recapitalising Capitalism’ (working title)

We quickly thrashed out an outline for the book and got to work, making good progress despite being close to death with man flu and Bert’s best efforts to distract me. (A series of 6am starts helped a lot, courtesy of my kidneys still being on UK time.) Over the course of the week we broke the back of the first draft, which will ultimately go to a professional ghost writer to be polished before it’s published. The short version is:

Deregulation of the financial sector under Reagan and Thatcher was a deliberate and very successful policy to grow the US and UK economies, unleashing the power of capitalism and outspending the Soviets — ending the Cold War without a missile being fired.

However, in the process we created a monster, setting in train events that would release a flood of easy money and erode accountability in the banking sector, ultimately paving the way for the Global Financial Crisis.

The relentless progress of technology has further facilitated this financialisation of the world in which we live. Additionally, while communications technology enables us to connect with each other better than ever before, it has also allowed the growth of unaccountable trillion-dollar global corporations that aggressively mine our personal data in search of revenues.

All of this has only accelerated since the GFC. Humans are now valued based on their ability to provide data and act as containers for debt — particularly mortgages and student debt, which many will be paying back for most of their lives.

The inequalities and injustices of the past decade have led to growing resentment and threaten democracy itself, as evidenced by events from the Arab Spring to the politics of division and the rise of the far right across the West.

There is no easy way out of this. Public, corporate and personal debt are so high they can never be repaid. Public trust in institutions and every form of authority is at a low. The trajectory for the economy and democracy is not a positive one; a growing proportion of the world’s citizens are disenfranchised and angry.

Crypto offers a unique set of tools and opportunities to begin to address these problems, building wealth and recapitalising ordinary consumers through their everyday commerce. By doing so, we might rehabilitate the capitalism that has lost its way, offering hope to those who — like the Millennials who are already embracing crypto — feel left behind by the system that apparently worked so well for their parents’ generation at their expense.

While Rob wrote a series of sections based on his personal experience and career in the Navy, it was my job to provide the background on the evolution of money (TL;DR: don’t trust government with your gold; they tend to get a bit Gollum-ish about it), the banking sector, Big Tech, blockchain and crypto.

By Sunday my brain refused to start, so I headed into Sydney for some R&R. In brief, this included 1) Wandering around in search of lunch, 2) Being invited to join four women for lunch in what felt suspiciously like an episode of Sex and the City, 3) Declining the offer to seek enlightenment in a dark, soundproof tank of lukewarm salty water. Or possibly fall asleep, I wasn’t sure of the difference. It was not an entirely satisfactory day in some undefinable way, but did the job as far as recovery was concerned. By the time I left on Wednesday, we’d managed a good 30,000 words and, more importantly, established a clear narrative of what had happened and how crypto might change things for the better.

Darlinghurst

While most of the time was spent working on the book and paying Bert attention (he kept asking where Cyrille was, and why hadn’t I brought him?), I did get to spend a little time at Incent HQ in Darlinghurst. Among other things, I got to meet David, the new PR guy, and spend some time with him working through material that will go out to the press in various forms in the coming weeks. I chatted to Jaxon (business dev) a fair amount too, about his ideas for using Incent for off-the-cuff promotions rather than solely for traditional-style loyalty programmes. For example, a business might realise they typically see a lull in activity mid-morning on a Thursday, and can push out a special time-limited promotion to increase footfall. That kind of flexible, pay-as-you-go, on-demand approach is highly appealing to small businesses. Additionally, Incent’s new CMO will come on board in a couple of weeks; more on that when she’s officially started.

Otherwise, one very encouraging meeting took place at the Owl House (now branded with Incent’s logo), where a where a local businessman had taken the initiative and gathered together a group of representatives from a dozen or so businesses in the same street. The idea was to build a coalition of Incent-using shops and create a bit of a story to help generate some media interest in the process.

Building critical mass is really important — the more businesses that use Incent in Darlinghurst, the more will want to use it. But there’s a chicken and egg problem there. We’ve found that Incent is incredibly easy to add to a business on the technical level; as intended, the banking API requires almost zero tech effort to integrate (in fact, you can even do it without the business knowing or consenting — as is the case with 2.0, a coffee shop popular with the guys in the office). But there’s an education piece that goes with it: to make the most of the opportunity, the staff need to understand it, there will ideally be some branding and advertisement, and so on. That’s where the overhead lies. And so establishing the case for Incent and cultivating an ecosystem is important if we are to convince others to use it. That’s why there’s been plenty of interest, but actual integrations have lagged. What’s needed is a growth hack. The meeting at the Owl was great, but there was something even more meaningful on the horizon.

Gfinity

The big news is, of course, the Gfinity integration. This has been on the cards for months, with the devs working hard on the basis of the MOU agreed some time back. But in terms of publicity, we couldn’t let the cat out of the bag until the final agreement had been passed back and forth between the lawyers, thrashed to within half an inch of its life and, finally, signed. More than one crypto project has found promising leads evaporate when ‘news’ gets out before the deal is done, causing embarrassment to all involved and burning any goodwill that may have existed. This is aside from the reality that crypto crowd has become thoroughly tired of hype that has nothing to back it up. What counts is working software and meaningful partnerships.

Incent has now built the former and Gfinity delivers the latter in spades. Video gaming is big business — a $100 billion industry — and it’s growing fast. Crypto has unique advantages to offer gaming, from borderless transfer of funds to tradeable digital tokens, and gamers are well-placed to understand crypto in a way that others aren’t. So this is the ideal way to drive engagement with those eSports audiences.

Better still, Gfinity is a Darlinghurst company with a significant userbase, making it just about the perfect partner to help Incent build critical mass locally as well as give it a calling card for our next business partnerships. With 300,000 users, we’re looking at distributing Incent to tens of thousands of new wallets, and there will be a strong presence in Sydney. Moreover, the tech is highly portable, meaning that integration with other such initiatives will be straightforward when the time comes. From the PR:

New and existing Australian fans watching the Gfinity Elite Series will now have their time and levels of engagement rewarded with an innovative new, tradeable cryptocurrency (INCNT).

Incent co-founder and CEO, Rob Wilson, said the deal is the culmination of two years’ hard work developing a truly scalable, world-class digital currency platform that is simple, flexible and secure to use.

“This is a massive opportunity for Incent to plug in to one of the world’s fastest-growing communities and introduce it to a completely unique, simple and frictionless means of acquiring a tradable digital currency that is theirs to keep, and does not expire. This is the first ever mass-market application for crypto in Australia — if not the world — and we’ll be putting crypto into the hands of tens of thousands of new users as a result of this one partnership alone.”

So that’s about all. It just remains to say a big ‘thank you’ to the Wilsons for their hospitality once again, and for all their food, beers and [legal, over the counter] drugs I consumed while I was there. And Bert, I’m sure Cyrille will come and see you very soon, and then you can salivate extensively on his elbow too.