In the next years, banknotes, coins, checks and credit cards will all be hugely inefficient and will be replaced by digital money, which is easier and faster to process. According to recent studies, by 2020 the 90 percent of all payment transactions made in US and more than 50 percent of those made in Europe will be cashless. Moreover, 45 percent of 25–34 year olds in US declare to feel comfortable with the idea of using independently issued currencies.
At the moment there are over 4 thousands privately issued currencies in more than 35 countries and from 2009 when Bitcoin was deployed in the market we now count almost 500 different digital currencies.
We glimpse a future characterized by the creation and diffusion of community-based digital currencies that will be used in closed-form environments as tools for internal rewarding, customer loyalty programs or incentive and governance schemes. The communities will be either organized in state institutions or in private corporations and they will issue their own brand coin.
The time has now come for custom coins developed for specific brands. There are already platforms that allow anyone to create their own digital currency according to their own rules and usage limits within the community and the organisation. Moreover, there are already payment networks like Ripple enabling different currencies to be sent easily between members.
In the long run it will then be possible for every single smartphone users in the planet to have a digital wallet for each brand coin and everyone will be instantly able to exchange their brand coins, in the form for example of loyalty points, with other altcoins or hard currencies via a unique global market with a single decentralized clearing mechanism.
This will massively upgrade the transaction efficiency and will increase the currency-utility of reward.