Rouge - Blockchain Coupon Platform

We present a protocol — the Rouge Network — as a suite of smart contracts using a specific token — the Rouge token — on the Ethereum blockchain. This open-source platform reduces costs, friction and the need for trusted middlemen to produce non-falsifiable, non-repudiable and unique usage coupons. The Rouge platform will foster an ecosystem of decentralized applications (ÐApps) opening new possibilities for coupons. Trackable, verifiable, monitizeable, secure, frictionless and unique coupons are the future of digital marketing. The growth of the digital coupon market is phenomenal, and this market is a perfect use case for the smart contract paradigm.

The Rouge Project will build a coupon platform on top of the Ethereum to leverage its decentralized nature and smart contract paradigm. The project goal is to offer and maintain new kinds of marketing coupon services that will be simpler to use, more secure, more flexible and more efficient. It offers value propositions for all actors of its ecosystem:

• For brands and merchants (coupon “Issuers”), it will be easier and less expensive to create and manage coupons. The platform based on smart contracts and public ledger will also allow them to get more information on coupons. The public tracking and cryptographic nature of each coupon will make their accounting self-evident, fraud-resistant (e.g. no double redemption) and ensure that an Issuer only pays a Publisher for the advertisement of a coupon distributed to a real User.

• For the general public (coupon “Users”), the platform and its smart contracts will give them verifiable guarantees on the marketing terms and real value of the coupon (e.g. bring an end to the random error message, “This coupon is not valid anymore”) and allow secondary markets where users will be able to transfer or resell coupons they acquired they do not wish to use.

• For content creators and publishers (coupon “Publishers”), thanks to the automatic, trustless and decentralized characteristic of the platform, with no middlemen in the equation, they will receive a higher ad revenue from coupon ads. Plus, the mere nature of this new kind of digital coupons that have a provable intrinsic value (i.e. that could be even resold on a secondary market) can be a reinforcing factor to boost their own audience.

Finally, the payment transactions between all actors in this ecosystem will become extremely efficient, permissionless, risk-free (since cryptocurrency payments are not reversible) and will be automatically handled by smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine