Blackbird Labs, a hospitality tech startup founded by Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, announced on July 30 that it has launched a Web3 payments platform for restaurants called Blackbird Pay.
According to a statement, the platform, built on Blackbird’s new blockchain network, Blackbird Flynet, will offer restaurants “a way to address the ever-growing challenges of shrinking margins and eroding cash reserves by providing the first-ever, fully-fledged end-to-end payment and check clearing network.”
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Blackbird Pay is designed to speed up checkout times and reduce transaction costs for restaurants to an average of about 2% per transaction. Additionally, diners can pay with Blackbird’s native token, FLY, which is issued as a reward on the platform. Currently, restaurants face transaction fees of up to 4%.
“Over the past decade, restaurant technology has made virtually no progress when it comes to payments, which are expensive, cumbersome and technically opaque for most restaurants,” Leventhal said.
Blackbird Pay allows diners at member restaurants to pay directly in the Blackbird app using a credit or debit card, FLY tokens, or USD Coin (USDC). The app also assigns each user a unique Guest Value Score, which member restaurants can use as a basis for custom points, benefits, and privilege programs, Blackbird said.
Web3 startups are gaining ground in the restaurant industry, with potential use cases ranging from cost reduction to rewards program management to gamification. Existing players include DevourGO, a Web3 food delivery service. According to the National Restaurant Association, U.S. restaurant sales are expected to exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history by 2024.
Roni Mazumdar, co-owner of Unapologetic Foods, said services similar to BlackBird can save restaurants “thousands of dollars a month in processing fees.”
Blackbird is also developing messaging and discovery applications for restaurants, including programs like Blackbird Breakfast Club and Bar Blackbird, which the company says are designed to drive traffic to restaurants during off-season periods.
The company raised $24 million in a Series A venture funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Blackbird’s current restaurants include Barbuto, Crown Shy, Momofuku, Nom Wah, Saga in New York, Leon’s in Charleston, and Birdsong in San Francisco.
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