Beenz.com

» see beenz.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Beenz launched in 1998 with a deceptively clean pitch. The web needed its own currency. You would earn beenz for visiting partner sites or making purchases at them. You would spend beenz at any merchant inside the network. The exchange rate was set centrally. The company sat in the middle and clipped a fee. It was, a closed-loop loyalty program with the word "currency" used very aggressively in the marketing.

It raised close to $100 million from a who's who of late-90s investors, including Larry Ellison and François Pinault. It opened offices in 15 countries and hired serious payment-industry people to staff them. For about eighteen months in 1999 and 2000 you could not read a tech magazine without seeing the green Beenz logo somewhere in the back pages.

i did not use beenz. i was 14 in 1998 in turkey, dialing in over a 33.6k modem, and the products that mattered at home were free email and chat clients. beenz was an enterprise sales motion dressed up as a consumer brand, and the consumer brand never reached me. by the time i would have been old enough to care about web payments, the company had already been wound down.

~ the case file ~

~ the model ~

The model was real and not insane. A user would land on a partner site, do whatever the partner wanted that day (clicking through a sign-up flow was the most common ask), and the partner site would credit beenz to that user's account. The user could then redeem beenz against goods at other partner sites. Behind the scenes, partners paid Beenz.com to issue the currency, and other partners paid Beenz.com to honor it. Beenz.com sat in the middle, ran a ledger, and clipped a margin. The closer you look at it, the more it resembles loyalty points with a marketing department drunk on a different vocabulary.

Where it broke was that real e-commerce kept getting easier in parallel. PayPal and the existing card networks handled cross-border purchases over rails the user already had. There was no compounding reason to introduce a new unit of value if the user already had a card that worked everywhere.

~ the death ~

Beenz tried to IPO. The window closed. It tried to raise more private money. The window closed again. By summer 2001 the dot-com bust had stripped out the partner network that gave beenz any redemption value. Carlson Marketing Group bought what remained on August 26 2001 and folded the technology into its own loyalty programs. The beenz.com domain was allowed to lapse.

~ what it foreshadowed ~

Beenz pre-figured a lot of later ideas. Stablecoin-style closed-loop dollars and the entire points-as-currency conversation that airlines and crypto would later argue about. Bitcoin's whitepaper would not appear for another seven years. Beenz was solving the right problem with the wrong infrastructure. There was no public ledger and no cryptographic guarantee that any beenz you held would still be worth anything tomorrow. There was just a private company in london keeping a database, hoping enough merchants would honor what was in it.

That is fine in a bull market. It is the entire problem in a bear one.

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