SKUx Partners with Hedera Hashgraph to Bring Trust, Transparency, and Fraud-free Transactions to Consumer Offers and Settlement

SKUx, an innovative fintech company redefining the way consumer offers are delivered, redeemed, settled, and reported, today announced a strategic partnership with Hedera Hashgraph to bring unprecedented levels of trust, transparency, access, and environmental sustainability to payment-based consumer offers.

Hedera is the most used, sustainable public ledger, and will provide SKUx and its growing ecosystem of retailers, brands, and marketing services companies with unprecedented high-throughput and a secure network for logging and verifying all transactions and data powered by the SKUx platform. SKUx’s platform is a major advancement in the future of payments as the new currency of consumer promotions and offers.

SKUx has created a breakthrough new fintech category of payment-based offers, called SKUPay™, set to replace today’s archaic world of coupons, rebates, offers and settlement. Unlike paper or even digital coupons, SKUPay offers are payments, and each offer is serialized, trackable and redeemable only once, becoming an unconvertible currency that virtually eliminates fraud and misredemption. The SKUx platform requires no special POS integration, enables daily settlements for retailers (as opposed to lengthy and costly clearinghouse processes), provides near real-time insights into campaign results and transactions, and enables anytime, anywhere offer delivery, from store shelves, email, social media, mobile, on-pack, display media, and more.

Today’s outdated coupon and settlement system wastes billions of dollars due to fraud, misredemption and costly clearinghouse processes —money that could be used to provide more value and satisfaction to consumers and greater incremental growth for brands and retailers.

The Hedera network exponentially enables SKUx’s platform to deliver computational trust and transparency at scale to the entire retail offer ecosystem, including retailers, ecommerce businesses, consumer brands, and marketing agencies. The SKUx Smart Incentives™ platform, running on the Hedera public distributed ledger network, will seamlessly track and record all transactional data as a secure hash on the Hedera public ledger.

“Our partnership with Hedera Hashgraph is a major step forward in advancing the first phase of our founding vision towards applying distributed ledger technology for the entire supply chain of an offer, from issuance to redemption to settlement,” said Bobby Tinsley, co-founder and executive vice president of SKUx. “It will be critical in this new retail era to have seamless and trusted payment transactions for all retailers, brands and consumers. The Hedera network represents the gold standard in enterprise-grade, distributed ledger technology for ensuring trusted and decentralized transactions at massive scale.”

“We’re excited about bringing SKUx and SKUPay offers onto the Hedera network,” said Mance Harmon, CEO and co-founder of Hedera. “Payment-based offers and settlement are the next evolution of retail. At their core, they align with Hedera’s mission of creating transparent, highly-scalable digital economies and ecosystems while solving for inefficiencies; inefficiencies such as what exists in today’s fraudulent coupon industry. SKUx can empower every retailer, consumer, and brand to realize greater value, efficiency, and trust from consumer offers, delivering tremendous value to a large financial ecosystem.”

Hedera and SKUx are each committed to the principle of environmental sustainability. The Hedera network’s unique energy-efficient hashgraph algorithm dramatically reduces the carbon footprint associated with heavy computational blockchain systems. In addition, the Hedera Governing Council has committed to purchasing carbon offsets on a quarterly basis, with amounts determined by the third-party assessment provider Terrapass, and as of Q3 2021, the Hedera network is carbon negative. The SKUx SKUPay payment-based offers system dramatically reduces energy consumption and negative environmental impacts—from digitizing and accelerating offer settlements to virtually eliminating the use of paper.