Dual token wallet drives mobile engagement in a new, privacy-focused data economy

An enterprise software company focused on mobile engagement has released a cryptocurrency wallet that is at the heart of a new blockchain ecosystem.
PhunWallet will give consumers control of their personal data, while letting them earn rewards by engaging with brands.
With 12 years of experience helping companies connect with consumers via mobile, publicly traded Phunware is building a dual-token economy by blockchain-enabling its data exchange and loyalty ecosystem. With its Multiscreen-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform, Phunware specializes in contextual mobile engagement, meaning content can be customized for a precise location, time and person.
PhunCoin, a regulated security token, will let consumers choose how and when to share the personal data — now considered the world’s most valuable asset — that they are now giving away to tech and social media giants. PhunToken is a utility token consumers can earn by engaging with branded loyalty programs.
In the PhunWallet dual-token ecosystem, it helps to think of PhunCoin as the gold mine, and PhunToken as the picks and shovels used to extract the gold from that mine, Phunware COO Randall Crowder explained in a recent video.
PhunWallet’s role in this ecosystem is not just to store crypto. It will “serve as a hub for ongoing engagement with brands and even provide a marketplace for digital offers and goods in the future,” Crowder said. Along with collecting and storing those rewards, the wallet will be a central hub for ensuring consumers opt in to programs, as well as collecting the necessary Know Your Customer (KYC) information that is both required by regulators and necessary for program security.
Empowering consumers
Phunware turned to blockchain because it was uniquely suited to address the current era of data exploitation by empowering consumers to be compensated for sharing their data and engaging with brands on a large scale, Crowder said.
Calling its platform “the infrastructure for the decentralized data economy,” Crowder added, “the future of engagement is contextual, and our platform was specifically designed to get the right content to the right person at the right time in the right place,” Crowder said. “By leveraging blockchain we can now verify and incentivize this kind of contextual engagement.”
More insights from Phunware Phunware
A consumer would earn PhunCoin when a brand accesses the data they have agreed to share on Phunware’s data exchange, while PhunToken is awarded for participating in certain activities.
PhunWallet, PhunCoin and PhunToken can all carry Phunware’s brand or be white labeled to a brand and integrated into its own mobile app through Phunware’s blockchain-enabled software development kits (SDKs). At this time, PhunWallet is only available on Android, but Phunware expects to release PhunWallet on iOS by the end of the month.
Cruise on over
Phunware uses the example of a cruise ship using PhunCoin and PhunToken to identify and engage guests respectively. One behavior cruise lines want to encourage is having guests sign up for excursions, which cost extra. One of the best places and times to do this, the cruise industry has found, is when passengers first arrive onboard, excited about their trip.
A Phunware-enabled passenger would be identified by their mobile’s Phunware ID, enabling the company to identify them when parking, waiting to board, or newly arriving on the ship. PhunCoin would be earned when the company looks at data about demographics, interests and such as it sends push notifications about excursions.
PhunToken could be earned by behaviors like watching videos of those excursions, which have a much higher conversion rate than static ads. More could be earned for things like staying in the casino for a certain amount of time or ordering food to be delivered wherever they are on the ship. These could be branded as something specific to the client, like CruiseCoin rather than PhunToken.
“By marrying our software with blockchain, we can curate information in the virtual world in order to inform and reward real-world interactions on a one-to-one basis at scale,” Crowder said. “This is the future of engagement in a mobile-first world that is rapidly becoming mobile only.
Learn more about Phunware
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