Restaurant regulars now have a new — extremely high-tech — way to pay for their meals.

In July, Blackbird Labs, a hospitality tech company, announced the addition of a new payment platform on its app, Blackbird. The team launched the original app in 2022 as a way for loyal diners to earn perks at their favorite restaurants. It will now allow people to pay their checks right in the app through its blockchain, ensuring both a secure payment for the customer and a cheaper transaction for the restaurant. Here’s what you need to know about the app, the payments, and one potentially controversial new feature, the “guest value score.” 

What is the Blackbird app?

The app is the brainchild of Ben Leventhal, who also co-founded Resy and Eater. To date, Blackbird has raised $35 million.  

Blackbird offers diners a hybrid of Resy’s reservation platform and priority notification systems and Eater’s editorial features, with articles showcasing restaurants in its network. The app also incentivizes users to become regulars at their neighborhood restaurants with perks like welcome drinks, access to off-menu dishes, and free birthday desserts. 

Blackbird is also helping restaurants (which, according to TIME, pay about $89 to have access to the app) get serious startup capital through partnerships with spots like Gjelina New York, which started offering house accounts several months before its opening. Anyone who wanted (and still wants) premium access to Gjelina’s New York location can purchase the “Friends and Family” house account for $5,000, $10,000, or $25,000, which gives them access to a dedicated reservation line, a house account, a thank you gift, and $FLY bonuses (more on this later). According to Blackbird’s press release, the program helped Gjelina raise nearly $500,000 to open its new location. A similar partnership was just launched to help reopen Sra. Martinez, a restaurant by Michelle Bernstein in Miami.

The Blackbird app is free to download in the Apple Store and Google Store. Users can check into restaurants when they’re on-site, access loyalty rewards, and have the opportunity to DM restaurants directly for reservations. 

More than 150 restaurants are available through the app in New York, Charleston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, though the platform aims to lure in thousands of independent restaurateurs. Hotspots in New York City include Bangkok Supper Club, Nami Nori, Laser Wolf, Raf’s, Temple Bar, and Nom Wah, as do Sato Omakase, Osito, SPQR, and Birdsong in San Francisco, plus Kwei Fei and Rancho Lewis in Charleston, and Sweet Rose Creamery in Los Angeles. 

Blackbird’s new payment system

On July 30, Blackbird introduced its payment system, Blackbird Pay, to benefit diners and restaurants.

Guests will benefit as they can pay with Blackbird’s $FLY, a fungible token that lives in the app, which guests can earn every time they dine at participating restaurants. They can also earn more $FLY by doing things like sharing their personal information with the app, not unlike OpenTable rewards points or CashApp stars at a local coffee shop. “[It’s] like airline points, if airline points were 100% liquid all the time,” Leventhal told Fast Company. Diners without enough $FLY to cover their tab can add a credit or debit card to the app to tap and pay or pay with USDC (a stable cryptocurrency coin).

However, paying with $FLY is a pretty theoretical premise at this point. Several restaurant owners shared with TIME that they are unsure of accepting the payment, and one user noted he hasn’t been able to find a restaurant that will accept it either.

Perhaps most appealing to group diners, Blackbird Pay allows tables to easily split the check between their smartphones, and each person can set their own tip. Tables can also pay when they’re ready to leave without waiting for a server to drop a check. 

The new payment system is designed with restaurants in mind as well. Because Blackbird Pay uses Blackbird’s own blockchain, businesses are charged 2% per transaction, which can help restaurants save on credit card processing fees, also known as “swipe fees.” By comparison, the Merchant Payments Coalition reports that the average swipe fee for Visa and Mastercard credit cards in 2024 hit 2.24%. Restaurants can even cash in on $FLY collected from customers, selling them back to the app at whatever the current exchange rate hits for the currency. (As Fast Company reported, right now, 1 $FLY is equivalent to 1 cent.) These savings could make all the difference to individual restaurants and the industry, especially considering that 4,500 more independent restaurants closed than opened in 2023.

“Blackbird Pay has the power to revolutionize the entire restaurant business,” Roni Mazumdar, the co-owner of Unapologetic Foods, shared in a press release about Blackbird Pay. “Being able to save thousands of dollars a month in processing fees alone is incredible, but being able to now have one place where we can strengthen ongoing relationships with our customers is a total game changer in this challenging environment.”

Blackbird’s Guest Value Score 

Also new to Blackbird is the Guest Value Score. The score is calculated via proprietary metrics that Blackbird hasn’t disclosed (however, we know that diners who live in the same neighborhood as the restaurant get a higher score at their community spots). “The score is not absolute, and in fact it varies, based on a variety of factors, such as whether or not you live nearby a restaurant,” Leventhal says.

The goal of the Guest Value Score is to help restaurants better understand and value frequent diners. The only downside for diners is they can’t see their value score; only the establishments can. Restaurants can then entice and reward regulars and build a business around wooing locals. It’s a unique premise, especially as restaurant reservations can feel trickier to secure. 

“The Guest Value Score is a data point we use to help restaurants contextualize their guests and deliver hospitality,” Leventhal shared with Food & Wine. “It is one of several tools we are developing to ensure that no Blackbird guest ever walks into a restaurant as a stranger to the establishment… At this time, only restaurants are able to see the Guest Value Score but we are considering ways of revealing it to guests in the future.”

Now, it’s up to diners to decide if they’re OK with restaurants collecting so much personal data about them in exchange for being recognized as regulars. However, Leventhal believes this technological leap is at least a good one for the restaurant industry.

“In the last decade, we’ve seen great advances in restaurant technology, but we have made virtually no progress with payments, which tend to be expensive, cumbersome, and technologically opaque for most restaurants,” Leventhal added in the press release. “Blackbird Pay changes all of that, and we’re excited to partner with the restaurant industry to forge a new path forward.”