Air Miles Announces Plans to Join the Metaverse

I’ve been covering the Air Miles saga a lot recently, and their corporate maneuvering has been anything but confidence-inspiring.

Adding three retail partners earlier this month doesn’t look like it can elevate the wings of the dipping Air Miles jet against the seemingly-unstoppable Scene+ juggernaut. As it turns out, we haven’t gotten to Air Miles’s most baffling collaboration yet.

Today, let’s talk about how Air Miles is coming to the metaverse, and how crypto is involved in the partnership.

A Bizarre Partnership

On November 22, 2022, Air Miles announced that it will partner with not one but two companies to have a consumer-facing, digital loyalty program. The new partners of the Air Miles program will be both the Metaverse Group and Tokens.com.

To clarify any confusion: the Metaverse Group is not the same thing as Meta (formerly known as Facebook), but it advertises itself as a company that specializes in using the blockchain to purchase virtual real estate in the metaverse, if and when it launches to the public.

The metaverse, also known as Web3, is the prospective next “evolution” of the internet, designed to enable users to work and interact with virtual spaces. The easiest point of reference my technology-addled mind can think of is the immersive online virtual reality simulation presented in Stephen Spielberg’s 2018 film Ready Player One.

On the other hand, Tokens.com describes itself as “a publicly-traded company that invests in Web3 assets and builds businesses linked to crypto staking, the metaverse, and play-to-earn gaming.” What this means, is that it puts money into crypto products to back new coins or projects with real capital as collateral, and it also seems to want to invest in the metaverse and video games.

To call these companies speculative would be an understatement. Is there value in metaverse “real estate?” Potentially, but when paying rent for a roof over one’s head can feel hard, it must feel doubly so for virtual space.

On top of this, in the wake of  the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX and nose-diving cryptocurrency prices, one must wonder if this is the best partnership for Air Miles to be announcing in late 2022.

However, the…