Enhancing the retailer gift card via blockchain: Trusted resale and more

Though the retailer gift card has been an ultra-practical marketing tactic to attract customers to spend more, it, on the contrary, also places a great number of customers in troublesome situations due to its current limitations. First, dealing with unwanted gift cards is often time-consuming, costly, or even risky due to the frequent occurrences of gift card resale frauds. Worse still, the issuance and redemption of gift cards happen inside the retailer as in a “black-box,” indicating that a compromised retailer can cheat customers (or even third-party auditors) to deny the issuances of some unredeemed gift cards. This paper proposes a practical middle-layer solution based on blockchain to address the fundamental issues of the existing gift card system, with incurring minimal changes to the current infrastructure.