Flipkart’s FireDrops Looking To Test New Use Cases Beyond Metaverse, NFTs

Ecommerce major Flipkart, which has been exploring Web3 and blockchain technologies since last year via Flipkart Labs,  is now looking to test new use cases beyond metaverse and non-fungible tokens.

As per ET’s report, Flipkart is working with Polygon for its Web3 initiatives and aims to strengthen this collaboration throughout the year. This partnership is believed to have the potential to transform the way Indians shop and engage with brands online.

Inc42 has reached out to Flipkart for a comment on the development. The story will be updated based on the response.

“While there are a bunch of experiments that get conducted through Flipkart Labs around augmented reality, virtual shopping and the likes, the initial experiments on converting rewards into NFTs have shown good results. The idea is to now scale the product over the next phase,” a senior executive told ET.

“There are already around 3.6 Mn user wallets that were created as of the end of last year by Flipkart on the blockchain. The target now is to multiply the efforts and bring more users on the chain by the end of this year,” said Aishwary Gupta, ecosystem head, business development at Polygon Labs told ET.

By betting on gamification, Flipkart offers users an engagement platform where brands create various quests. Users solve these quests to win NFTs, which are redeemable as discounts during ecommerce purchases and can also be traded among users.

The early experiments have shown that brands have experienced a higher return on investment through the NFT programme, with gamification leading to increased engagement levels.

By utilising blockchain technology, Flipkart aims to enhance its brand engagements and track promotional content, monitoring their conversion into sales.

In the future, as blockchain technology becomes more widespread and central bank-backed digital currencies gain wider acceptance, there may be opportunities to integrate digital payments into the entire metaverse, according to another informed source.

“These are very early days and CBDC is not part of the play yet,” he said.

This comes months after Flipkart announced its plan to utilise the blockchain scaling startup Polygon’s chain development kit (CDK) to enhance the scalability of its FireDrops Web3 loyalty program. 

In 2022, Flipkart announced a partnership with Polygon to establish a blockchain ecommerce Centre of Excellence (CoE), aimed at advancing Web3 research in the country.