The Global Awards Token

Introduction
The Current Reward Ecosystem
The global incentives and rewards industry is estimated to be worth around US$320 billion in 2017, 
and is growing at 6% per annum. However, there is a shocking level of under-utilization. Although the 
average consumer is a member of at least 29 incentive programs, 76% of the consumers simply do not 
use their shopping incentives1
. According to the 2016 Bond Loyalty Report, which queried 12,000 
Americans and 7,000 Canadians about their 280 loyalty programs across all industries, the percentage 
of active members was only 50 percent and of these a full one-fifth had never redeemed their rewards. 
The same report also showed that loyalty rewards members who do not make redemptions were 2.7 
times more likely to defect from a program and join another.
The reason we ignore so many incentive programs, is because all programs generally look the same. 
Each provides, to varying degrees, some form of bonus, some form of discount, or some sort of 
privileged access. With an average of 29+ programs to track, it is not surprising that we have difficulty 
utilizing our rewards.
The Problem 
While some economists may argue that low rewards utilization is good for the merchant, we think this 
instead highlights gross inefficiencies in the industry. There is no use, in our view, of issuing thousands 
of rewards to consumers who routinely ignore them. This creates a bad user experience and is a waste 
of resources on the merchant’s end.
Even though discount coupons and loyalty rewards are powerful tools to trigger purchases, there is a 
surprising lack of consumer utilization. We believe this is a consequence of the traditionally illiquid 
and inflexible nature of retail rewards and shopping incentives, meaning users aren’t easily able to 
transfer, exchange or sell them to other users. Customers interested in a brand or product don’t have 
easy access to any potential coupons for the product or service they would actually like to buy. 
Oftentimes these coupons are given in the form of actual paper coupons or store cards to save loyalty 
points. Both are highly impractical for usage on a daily basis as they all have to be constantly carried 
around in physical wallets.
Merchants have a hard time retaining customers. Prior to the digital information age, comparing 
different offers was a lot harder than it is nowadays with online price comparisons and reviews. Today, 
consumers are much more likely to switch to whichever is the cheapest, or has the highest reviews. 
Brick-and-mortar merchants (offline stores) face an even tougher challenge without the rich data set of 
their online competitors to target consumer groups by demographics, spending preferences or 
geolocation. Brick-and-mortar merchants often send out large quantities of these coupons to users, 
creating vast amounts of spam without even offering real value to the consumer. To summarize, 
specifically these categories of merchant rewards have the following problems:
● Loyalty points: not interchangeable between stores or brands.

● Discount coupons: hard to acquire coupons for stores/brands people specific desire; carrying 
and managing numerous paper coupons is inconvenient.
● Free samples: not specifically for the stores, brands or products consumers desire.
The Solution
Cryptocurrency markets today provide merchants a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform their 
promotional rewards into digital assets. Digital assets have a market price and hence an immediate 
discernible value.
The only thing missing is a platform which allows for the secure exchange of rewards and which enables 
low cost cross-border payments and microtransactions. This will add liquidity to currently unused (and 
often discarded) coupons and loyalty rewards. Being able to exchange these rewards creates a situation 
where they have tangible value to everyone and are therefore not considered spam. Doing this on the 
blockchain means anyone can see and verify transactions and check supply. Blockchains offer the 
possibility for unique (and uniquely verifiable) items. As they are digital rewards for a multitude of 
stores, brands and merchants, they can be stored on a smartphone, without the need to carry around 
coupons or loyalty cards. Having them on your smartphone means your geolocation can be used to offer 
you specific airdrops. Moreover, exchanging and spending rewards and performing transactions from 
your smartphone wallet creates a variety of valuable data. This data can give merchants the opportunity 
to target specific groups of users with certain interests, demographics or location, further eliminating 
spam and offering value to consumers. 
GAT is the first system designed specifically to enable merchants to conveniently issue blockchain-

enabled rewards to a mass consumer audience. Discount coupons, promotions and loyalty rewards
will be air-dropped by geolocation as digital assets to customers on the GAT blockchain.
The key feature of the GAT system is that an infinite variety of merchant-created promotions can be 
freely traded for GAT, a public digital token. Customers can now take GAT to any exchange in the 
world and trade them for real cash. The ability to convert rewards into real money frees the customer 
from any single merchant or rewards ecosystem. It also allows consumers to achieve 100% utilization 
of their disparate rewards incentives.
The Global Awards Token
Introduction
The proposed Global Awards Token provides the solution to the above-mentioned problems. This 
chapter will describe the way in which the GAT System is the solution and even adds extra functionality 
and benefits to its stakeholders. The GAT System is a broader enterprise system through which global 
merchants may issue their own digital rewards that can be used as discounts, gift cards and other 
promotional offerings. These rewards are called “rewards” or “merchant rewards”. GAT acts as the 
backbone to the system and is an ERC20 digital token that has been launched on the Ethereum main 
network. Consumers can use their GAT to acquire Merchant Rewards or to convert their Merchant

The Global Awards Token