It’s been a while since I wrote about restaurant loyalty and payments startup Blackbird, and now seems like an appropriate time. Over the past two years it has scaled to 500+ restaurants across three markets, introduced Blackbird Pay, and most recently, split its blockchain-powered $FLY rewards token into two parts with the launch of a new gas token called $F2 powering its new Flynet payment network. The impetus for this came as Blackbird pondered its long-term vision of extending such a network beyond its current set of restaurant applications, outlining that its $FLY token would remain a “stablecoin” that is pegged to $0.01 while $F2 governs the underlying blockchain network processing such transactions. In conjunction with the launch of Flynet / $F2, Blackbird is also opening itself up to developers who wish to tap into these currencies to build new tooling for the restaurant industry. This week, I pored over its latest whitepaper and podcast with Founder & CEO Ben Leventhal to gain a better understanding of what this might look like for the future of merchant payments.