What the customer sees
Your card, now Paid 47.00 USDC, Market Hall. Your purchase is on us. 47.00 USDC back.
The payment goes through as usual. Now and then, the next notification says it's on us.
Same budget as cashback
Take a 40 USDC dinner. At 2 % cashback, every customer gets 0.80 USDC back, and nobody remembers it. With Fade, the issuer spends the same 0.80 USDC on a ticket for each payment, and every customer has a chance to get the whole dinner back: 1 in 50 before Fade’s margin, about 1 in 51 at a 2 % margin. The budget is the same. The reward is one people talk about.
Same budget per payment. Cashback spreads it thin; a ticket gives the whole dinner back to about 1 customer in 51.
What the card issuer gets
- A reward people talk about. It stands out from every other card’s cashback.
- A fixed cost, set upfront. The issuer’s cost never depends on who wins: it is the ticket price, on every payment.
- No prize pool, no draws to run. Fade’s vault pays every win to the issuer, in full, and the issuer credits the card as it does a cashback.
- One instruction in the payment it already sends. No new flow for the customer, nothing extra to sign.
Design the offer
Same reward budget, two strategies. The issuer picks:
Both cost the same 0.80 USDC per payment: it is a marketing choice. Outcomes can also be mixed on one ticket, up to 32 of them (“1 in 100 gets the whole purchase, 1 in 10 gets 5 % back”), as long as the expected reward stays within the budget. The program refuses any payout table that pays out more than its price, less the margin, on average.
The Ticket page of the app builds tables of the same kind live, and Design your offer walks through the shapes and what the vault can cover.
The arithmetic
The “Rare and large” ticket on the 40 USDC dinner, at a 2 % declared margin and no app share:
An idle vault backs that ticket from about 7 850 USDC of assets (0.5 × the 100 bps vault margin is 50 bps of the free balance). The “Often” ticket (
m = 50 000, p = 196 000 000) reserves only 3.21 USDC. See Payout tables for sizing a reward against the vault.
Every ticket pays a fixed SOL cost for its own draw, so the program sets a minimum ticket price (Margin and shares). An issuer whose per-payment budget is below it can group a customer’s payments into one ticket, for example one ticket per day of spending.
Who funds the ticket
The issuer, from the rewards budget it already spends. The customer pays nothing extra and never more than the normal price, which is what keeps the offer a promotion. An issuer that routes rewards someone else funds (a merchant’s, a network’s) can keep an app share of 0 to 5 % of each ticket. See Who pays what.How it is wired
The open rides in the same transaction as the payment’s settlement, or follows it from the issuer’s server. The service hands the ticket to a keeper, and the result lands a few seconds later, ready for the notification. The issuer receives the reward and credits the card, and it can show each customer the public ticket behind their reward. See Integration overview.
Wording
Say “on us” or “won back”. Do not call the reward a refund: the sale is not cancelled.The issuer runs the reward as organiser and is responsible for the rules of each market it serves. Fade is the technology provider. We recommend going over those rules with counsel before launch. See Legal framework for the design rules and a summary by region.