How is Crypto Strengthening Local Business?
(Photo : How is Crypto Strengthening Local Business?)

Local business accounts for almost 50% of the US economy's GDP and employment, and the entire leisure industry, including gyms, entertainment venues, salons, and sporting events took a massive knock from the global pandemic, creating a real imbalance in the revenue for these business types, while simultaneously grocery stores and consumer deliveries saw massive gains.

Just how big was the knock? In order to understand the severity of the impact, analysts have looked at both the effects on total consumer spending and the average revenue for businesses who were able to carry on offering products and services.

As you would imagine, there is a huge disconnect over these business types throughout 2020 and leading into 2021, with a huge percentage of the former having to close their doors for good.

Now that the vaccine has seen such a huge success in rollout coverage, some innovative crypto projects are seeking to help support local businesses.

Crypto Supporting Local Businesses

Contactless payments have been one crucial avenue in the fight against Covid. Bitcoin and the other cryptos seek to make all payments contactless and instant, by using smart contracts on the blockchain. Sounds complicated? It's not, with a single click users can make some of the safest, most instantaneous payments, with the lowest fees.

One fun app is encouraging users to get back out into the outdoors and to start interacting with local businesses. Triffic is as its name suggests a terrific game for those who are looking to combine their daily walk, or shop with a gaming format. Walk, run, cycle, drive or crawl; no matter how you do it, the more you move, the more Triffic miles you collect.  You can be incentivized and rewarded for moving about and collect your rewards in cryptocurrency. Find treasures on your outdoor explorations and use the wealth you accrue from the app to buy your own plots in the Triffic map. Then earn money from your own plots of land.

This is a highly playable app, but the best part is you are rewarded for moving more and visiting your local shops.

Another cool crypto development is GoodDollar, Founded by the makers of eToro, the most popular social trading platform. Their vision is financial inclusion - giving people easy and free access to global financial markets, especially the unbanked and advocating to collect charitable funds from those who can, to those who most need them. Moreover, they want to stop an inequality gap from forming in the world of digital assets. 

So far, over hundreds of thousands of people around the world are claiming GoodDollars. This form of universal basic income (UBI) has already appreciated 60%. 

Many people in South America, and other underdeveloped places, are using GoodDollars as a means for payment when it comes to their work (teaching english, logo design, etc.). Before this, these people had no means of participating in the financial markets. Now they can.

GoodDollar is effectively a tool for dishing out funds by way of crypto tokens to the most needy on the platform. Some like in this story are using it as a way to collect funds to support local businesses by way of collecting charity.

Getting out there and supporting your local businesses can be fun and rewarding especially when you match it to incentivized game play, charitable giving or just the ability to help prop up your neighborhood businesses by buying coffee and a croissant. Happy spending.

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