I am delighted to announce that on January 1, 2023, we officially launched the Bitcoin Market Journal (BMJ) token.
It is unlike anything that has come before.
The BMJ token is a member rewards token, which works like traditional loyalty programs such as reward points, airline miles, or frequent customer discounts. (Think Starbucks Rewards, Delta SkyMiles, or Amazon Prime.)
Premium members who connected their MetaMask digital wallets prior to January 1 received a valuable airdrop of BMJ tokens, sent directly to their wallet address. Going forward, Premium members will receive BMJ tokens on the 1st of every month.
I’ll describe what we’ve built, and why it is so revolutionary.
The Problem: Getting Started with Crypto
Remember our mission: to welcome the next 100 million people into crypto investing. (It’s at the top of every newsletter.)
Our approach is a long-term, buy and hold strategy in quality crypto assets (read more here). We’re not about chasing fads or short-term trading: we’re about helping our readers build long-term wealth as part of a diversified portfolio.
For five years, we’ve been talking with our community members, at our in-person events and Zoom workshops. What we’ve learned from listening to you is that the hardest part of crypto investing is just getting started.
In other words, once people get started with our monthly investment strategy, it has worked: our average reader has built over $200,000 in crypto assets. But too many people are sitting on the sidelines, still waiting to get started.
When we created our Premium membership in 2021, we designed it as a great “push” to overcome the inertia and get you started on your investing journey. With unlimited access to our in-depth research, reports, and workshops, it has worked: hundreds of happy Premium members are now onboarded to crypto.
But there is still so much potential in the millions of investors who haven’t discovered crypto. We believe – we know – that successful investing is a long-term game, and we wanted a way to make it stick.
Enter the BMJ Member Rewards Token.
The BMJ Member Rewards Token is a game-changer for the industry, because it requires you to create a digital wallet to receive them. It is the easiest on-ramp to crypto in the world.
Reward Tokens: A Blockchain No-Brainer
With so many blockchain-based tokens created over the last five years, it is mind-blowing that tokens are still not commonly used for member rewards, which are a no-brainer for blockchain.
Think about it: Why aren’t your United MileagePlus points on blockchain? Or your Dick’s Sporting Goods rewards points? Or your CVS ExtraCare points, which are instead printed on a receipt the length of the Magna Carta?
We believe there is room for something new.
Building reward programs on blockchain gives members additional benefits beyond the usual “buy 10 coffees, get 1 free”:
- Interoperability: Blockchain reward tokens can be opened up to a wide variety of companies, greatly increasing their benefits and reach. (Imagine using your Marriott rewards for third-party experiences like concerts and cruises.)
- Exchangeability: Reward points can be bought, sold, and transferred among participants, creating a secondary market where smaller balances can be cashed out, while larger participants can buy their way to bigger rewards levels. (Imagine buying those last 500 frequent flyer points on the open market to earn a free flight.)
- Transparency: Reward participants can have a complete accounting of how many reward points are in circulation at any time, while companies can watch reward points behavior and flow between users, identifying their most engaged customers. (Imagine seeing how many Starbucks Rewards are in circulation.)
We want to do for reward programs what cryptocurrency has done for money. In short, we want to set reward programs free.
Our Premium (paid) members are the first to experience this vision: you’ll receive monthly reward tokens that can be stored in your MetaMask digital wallet and redeemed for real-life rewards (see the current list here).
Our Vision for Reward Tokens
Today’s reward programs are tightly controlled and centralized: after all, there’s a real monetary cost to paying out rewards. (Free flights still cost money.)
For this reason, reward program rules often change, usually to the annoyance of customers who were saving up for that 50,000-mile bonus that’s now only available on Tuesdays in May, after a $100 processing fee. (No wonder they’re sometimes called frequent liar programs.)
A blockchain-based reward token disrupts these legacy programs as radically as the open-source movement disrupted programming.
Companies now issue the tokens, but they do not own them.
Instead, users own them, and can buy, sell, trade, collect, and redeem them like traditional money.
What companies lose in control, they more than gain in growing their reward ecosystem.
We envision reward systems that add incredible value to their users, allowing collaboration between complementary (or even competing) brands, and building a flywheel of mutual growth.
Imagine if BMJ tokens were not limited to our rewards, but could be redeemed for Spotify subscriptions, Life is Good T-shirts, or a Netflix streaming membership. These partner companies could easily accept our BMJ Member Rewards Token, and write it off as a marketing expense: the cost to acquire a new customer (a high-income customer with $200K in crypto, no less).
That’s the vision for tomorrow; here’s how the program works today.
How the Program Works
- Anyone can sign up for our free newsletter, which is delivered 3x/week.
- When they’re ready to “level up,” subscribers join our Premium program, which gets them a daily newsletter, plus a huge on-demand library of crypto investing content.
- Premium members then have the option of connecting their MetaMask wallet to the site (watch the video).
- With a connected wallet, they begin to accrue 10 BMJ tokens, on the 1st of every month.
- These tokens are ERC-20 compliant, and will be minted directly to Ethereum (we pay the gas fee)!
- These tokens can be “redeemed” (i.e., burned) for real-world rewards like T-shirts, NFTs, exclusive events, and more. As tokens are redeemed, they are burned.
- Click here to see the current list of Member Rewards.
We’ll be talking all this week about the journey to bring this token to life. You’ll learn how to tell how much money we’re making, why we chose Ethereum (not a Layer 2 solution), and why we predict this will kick off the next great wave of crypto growth.
Stay tuned – I promise it’s going to be rewarding.
Continue on to Part 2 in this series: How to Earn and Burn BMJ Reward Tokens >>
