GiftGuard was a proposal to bring secure gift card technology based on cryptography and blockchain to market. Insurgent Studios led a successful consortium application to EIT Digital, working with Ingenico, Bitwise and the University of Edinburgh.
In 2019, before the EIT Digital application, Insurgent Studios designed and built a working proof-of-concept demonstrator in-house: a small countertop unit, with sample cards, that could scan a gift card, check its balance, activate it and redeem value against it. All using a public blockchain ledger with a transaction time of appox. one second. Having the concept working in practice, rather than on paper, gave the consortium a concrete starting point for the proposal.
The application followed in 2020, with the funded activity planned to begin in January 2021, on a proposed budget of over €600,000. The aim was to turn the technology into a commercial product through a collaboration between industry and academic partners.
The work got as far as being scheduled: EIT Digital’s 2021–2022 Digital Finance portfolio lists GiftGuard as activity 21151, within its Retail Banking & Insurance strand.
Unfortunately, delays in the funding arrangements meant that the planned product development did not go ahead. GiftGuard remained an unrealised project, despite the successful application and the work that had gone into forming the consortium and preparing the proposal.
Further reading: EIT Digital’s 2021–2022 business plan, Figure 14 on printed page 37 and Chris Speed’s Winter 2021 project record, page 3.