American Express: Redeem Your Reward Points for Cryptocurrency

American Express’ recent application publication focuses on letting users redeem their reward points for cryptocurrency.

Users would register for reward point redemption with cryptocurrency using an authentication process. The system converts the reward points to a monetary value and interacts with a cryptocurrency exchange application programming interface (API) and makes a cryptocurrency purchase based on the corresponding monetary value. The cryptocurrency exchange API completes the purchase and writes the purchase to a cryptocurrency blockchain network, according to the blockchain wallet address specified by the user.

American Express would be the first major credit card company to offer a direct fiat currency-to-cryptocurrency redemption program. While American Express is far from the largest patent holder in the Cryptocurrency sector, this would give them a major advantage over Visa and Mastercard, neither of which have any published patents or applications offering a similar redemption program.