What this is

People hold value they can't easily use. Gift cards they won't spend, promo credit lines they can't draw down, loyalty points they'll never redeem. Companies profit from that friction. We route around it.

The problem

Gift cards exist because handing someone cash feels rude. So we give a card instead, and most people would rather have had the cash.

That gap is a business. Starbucks booked $215M in unused gift card balances in 2023. They got paid to hold $1.7B of customer money.

Resale doesn't fix it. Gift card exchanges charge 20%+ spreads because they buy cards up front, sit on them, and eat the loss when a card turns out stolen or drained. Most of their spread is the cost of holding inventory.

How we fix it

We never hold inventory.

Add a gift card and forget about it. If someone wants to spend at that store, we match them. They get a discount, you get cash. If you end up at the store first, you just use it yourself. Whichever happens first.

Nothing is bought until a buyer exists. Nothing sits on our books. A bad card fails at checkout, not after we've paid for it.

And the less work a card takes to use, the smaller the discount has to be. So we make it take no work.

The four levels

1. Cinemark (MVP). Movie Club credits can't be transferred, but you can buy a ticket for anyone from your own account. We turn unused credits into tickets other people buy.

2. Gift cards (go to market). The core product. Deposit a card, get cash when someone uses it, or use it yourself.

3. Cash advance (escape velocity). Turning a credit card into cash is expensive. Cash advances usually cost 4-5% plus 20%+ interest, and balance transfers charge a fee too. We let other people's purchases do it for you. Your card buys their item, and their payment comes back to you as cash, for what should be a few percent. Use it like a cash advance, to pay off another card like a balance transfer, or to finally make use of a 0% intro APR card.

4. Loyalty (retention). Sign up once and we handle every program. Skip the sign-up-for-a-discount gate at every grocery store, and get the best redemption on fast food points without doing the math. Within a single chain's catalogue, the same points are worth anywhere from 4% to 15% depending on what you redeem them for. We pick the good ones.

Where you redeem

1. Brick and mortar

   In store

   The easy one. Every store that issues gift cards has a register that reads its own barcode. We put that barcode on your phone. One flow, every store, no setup per merchant.

   For example

   Best Buy, Nike, Target and Walmart registers. We built balance readers for Best Buy and Nike. Target and Walmart rely on the seller’s figure and the buyer’s word.

   Today

   Built and tested with sample cards. No card has been used at a real register yet.

2. E-commerce

   Online

   Harder. Every checkout is different, so each store needs its own integration. We do the big ones.

   For example

   Best Buy and Nike checkouts.

   Today

   Built and tested against rebuilt copies of those checkouts. Nike’s has never been captured. It has never run on a live one, and the app does not offer it yet.

3. Account balance

   Account credit (Netflix, Apple, Starbucks)

   These brands don't let gift cards work at checkout. They load into your account balance instead, which kills resale. So we flip it: tell us you want your Netflix paid from gift cards whenever the discount clears 8%, and we buy one and apply it for you. Account credit is exactly what you wanted.

   For example

   Netflix, Apple (iTunes), Starbucks, and any brand whose cards only load into an account.

   Today

   Designed, not built. There is no code for it yet.

Morpho

Money in escrow waits days or weeks for delivery and return windows to close. Sitting still, it earns nothing.

We park it in a Morpho vault. The yield builds a reserve, and the reserve is what lets us pay sellers more up front instead of making them wait.

One rule we don't bend: payouts never wait on Morpho. We only lend what we won't need, the refund buffer can't be lent at all, and if a withdrawal is slow the payout goes out from the buffer anyway.

We looked at building our own lending market against seller receivables and decided not to. Lending markets stay solvent because outsiders will buy seized collateral. Nobody outside wants a claim only we can redeem, so that safety mechanism would never fire.

What is real today

This is a preview. No money moves.

Orders have only run on testnet, with a stand-in doing the Cinemark step. The real Cinemark booking has never run. No gift card has been used at a real register yet. You can try the buyer's side with a sample.

Nothing pays a seller yet, so do not add a real card.

Cash advances are built as code but cannot run yet, because nothing stores their accounts. Loyalty is designed, not built. Online checkout has not run for real, account credit is not built yet, and no money has gone into Morpho.