Can Crypto Give Restaurants the Boost They Need?

The world continues to adopt cryptocurrencies and their associated technologies. Questions on how cryptocurrencies solve problems industries face have surfaced. Change is occurring. Industries are going through massive shifts because of the changing times. The hospitality sector is one of those industries going through a massive shift. Restaurants are facing a stiffer operating environment. The current COVID-19 pandemic isn’t helping either.

Restaurants Have New Problems

For the last two years, restaurants all over the globe have had to shift their business models from eat-in to deliveries because of the lockdowns set in place by world governments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Because of the current topsy-turvy nature of global economies, access to credit has been a big issue for many restaurants. Credit has suddenly become very critical for restaurant operations, as demand for in-house services has stalled because of the emergence of new COVID-19 variants. Many governments have considered implementing lockdowns to curtail the spread of these new COVID variants.

Many restaurants have maxed out the lines of credit made available to them by financial institutions. It occurred due to the weak demand coming from their current eat-in models. Many owners try to change models to stay afloat.

The costs of migrating models are biting for many owners. Delivery models also have many issues. And it is telling as former connoisseurs of fine eating now prefer to be home buddies, thus giving delivery models a big boost as the world still teeters from the economic issues presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Food Delivery Models Come With Their Issues

As food delivery models have become popular, the many problems encountered by business owners come to light. At the top of this pile of problems is the slow wait time from order processing and fulfillment to the actual delivery itself.

Customers sometimes have to wait for eons before they get their orders. Payment systems experience a backlog as restaurant merchants don’t get credited for long periods. It exposes them to risks in supply chains from suppliers who depend on these merchants for their livelihoods.

There are also security issues that occur when dealing with fiat payment systems. Credit card numbers and other personally identifying information get stolen by hackers and get sold on the dark web in underground marketplaces.

There is also the current lack of business intelligence and analytics, from which predictive models get created and used for laser-targeted advertising.

As budgets tighten, restaurant owners have no choice but to create profitable digital advertising models that work. It comes with one problem: lack of accurate data. Without data, restaurant owners become sitting ducks. And the smartest competitors share the spoils.

How Do Cryptocurrency Ecosystems Solve These Problems?

Cryptocurrencies and their allied technologies solve these problems from day one to forever. For instance, Bistroo, a p2p marketplace, helps restaurants onboard delivery ecosystems on the payment side in less than twenty-four hours. They don’t yet do logistics and deliveries, but everything changes quickly in the cryptocurrency space.

In the Bistroo ecosystem, everybody gets paid on time. It is because of the real-time payments feature that cryptocurrencies bring to the table. As for credit, users can contribute loans to merchants and receive a portion of the merchant’s inflows as business improves over time.

Users also become Bistroo ambassadors for onboarding new restaurants into the community. The community-oriented growth has proven to be a booster in a period when the larger finance community is reeling from new variants of COVID.

Users get to stake their BIST tokens alongside merchants and receive rewards. BIST is the native token of the Bistroo community. Governance and other activities are determined using BIST.

Users can share their data, so their favorite merchants can advertise to them. Engagement between merchants and users is at an all-time high as issues get resolved quickly because of direct communications.

With expansion from their home base (Netherlands) on the horizon, the Bistroo model will undergo rapid growth and will scale faster and cheaper than other centralized solutions because of the underlying blockchain.

User tokens and data are secure, so hackers won’t have a field day stealing and selling anybody’s data within and around Bistroo.

Cryptocurrencies and their allied technologies provide a paradigm shift from a corporate-only focus to a user-centric focus where power resides with community members who are the biggest fans of these restaurants.

They also provide operation dynamics that are pandemic-proof. The low costs of maintenance, security, and onboarding provide more than the usual incentives for restaurants to get involved. Access to credit from users via smart contracts gives such systems the needed financial boost without the need for all the fancy bells and whistles the financial wizards come with.

So, in effect, the answer is yes! Crypto can give restaurants the boost they need. COVID-19 be damned, crypto will boost restaurants and everything else!