What Is Crush and Why We're Building It

Your Shopping Data Is Worth Billions. You Get Pennies.

Every year, consumers generate trillions of dollars in retail transaction data. What you buy, where you shop, how much you spend, and the price you pay. This data fuels a $31 billion consumer insights industry dominated by a handful of legacy providers like NielsenIQ and Circana. These companies sell your aggregated purchase data to brands for six- and seven-figure annual contracts.

You, the person who created all of that value, get almost nothing in return.

If you've ever used a receipt-scanning app like Fetch Rewards or Ibotta, you've seen the deal: scan your receipts, earn a few cents in proprietary points, wait weeks to redeem them for a gift card. Meanwhile, the company behind the app sells your aggregated data to CPG brands for orders of magnitude more than they paid you. Ibotta went public in 2024 at a $367 million annual revenue run rate, built almost entirely on data that consumers handed over for pennies.

The value exchange is broken. And it's broken on both sides.

The Problem

For Consumers

The frustration is measurable. According to Cordial, 47% of consumers cite expiring points as their number one frustration with loyalty programs. 43% are frustrated by how long it takes to earn rewards. And 37% say the value of rewards is simply too low to justify the effort. These aren't edge cases. Nearly half of all loyalty program users feel the system is designed against them. Don’t take our word for it check any subreddit related to Fetch or side-hustles to see how frustrated people are. You might relate.

The apps that do pay you for your data, apps like Fetch and Ibotta, all share the same structural problems:

• Points that expire and depreciate. Proprietary points are locked in a closed ecosystem. They expire after months of inactivity, lose value when the platform changes redemption rates, and can only be used within a narrow set of options the company chooses for you. The result is significant user dissatisfaction and billions in unredeemed points that become pure profit for the issuer. Crush never expires.
• No instant access. Most apps impose minimum redemption thresholds ($5, $10, $25) and processing delays. Your rewards are always just out of reach.
• Opaque monetization. You have no visibility into when your data is bought, what it's worth, or how much the platform profits. The economic relationship is entirely one-sided.
• Centralized control. The platform sets the rules, changes reward rates unilaterally, and can devalue your accumulated points at any time. You bear all the downside risk with zero upside participation.

For Brands

The companies that actually need this data face their own problems. Syndicated data contracts from legacy providers start at six figures annually. The data arrives with days or weeks of latency. Real-time pricing visibility across retailers and regions is difficult and expensive to collect at scale. And panel-based data extrapolates national trends from small samples, so granular breakdowns are often unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

In short: the data is overpriced, slow, and incomplete. The people who generate it get almost nothing. And the companies that need it pay too much for too little.

What Is Crush?

Crush is a consumer data network built on the Solana blockchain that changes the deal entirely. Instead of handing your data to middlemen who profit from it, Crush lets you own your contribution, earn real digital assets for sharing it, and participate directly in the value your data creates.

Here's how it works:

1. Contribute. Earn $CRUSH tokens by submitting receipts, linking your debit or credit cards, photographing product prices on store shelves, or browsing online with the Crush browser extension.
2. Aggregate. Crush validates, anonymizes, and structures all contributions into commercial-grade datasets that brands and researchers actually want to buy.
3. Monetize. Brands and research firms purchase anonymized insights through the Crush Data Marketplace.
4. Earn. When your data is purchased, the Crush buys the $CRUSH token on the open market, permanently burns 75%, and sends 25% back to the contributors whose data was accessed.

The more the network grows, the more scarce each token becomes. More data attracts more buyers, more buyers drive more burns, and a shrinking supply rewards the people who made it possible.

What Is the $CRUSH Token?

$CRUSH is a digital token on the Solana blockchain. It's what you earn for contributing data to the Crush network, and it's fundamentally different from the points you get from other apps.

Tokens, Not Points

$CRUSH is a liquid digital asset that you fully own. It lives in your wallet, not on a company's server. You can trade it, hold it, or cash it out at any time. There is no minimum balance, no redemption restrictions, and no platform-imposed rules. Your rewards never expire.

Compare that to every other receipt app: proprietary points that lock you in, expire after a few months of inactivity, and can be devalued at any time by the company that issued them.

The Token Is The Lifeblood of Crush’s Network

When a brand or research firm purchases data from the Crush Data Marketplace, the protocol uses those dollars to buy $CRUSH on the open market. Of the tokens purchased:

• 75% are permanently burned — removed from the total supply forever.
• 25% are sent back to contributors — the people whose data was actually purchased.

This means every data sale does two things: it rewards the contributors who made it possible, and it reduces the total supply of $CRUSH. As more buyers enter the network, more tokens are bought and burned, creating a natural deflationary cycle tied to real demand for consumer data.

$CRUSH is not a loyalty point. It's a real asset backed by real demand. And because it's a programmable on-chain token rather than a closed points system, it's a foundation we can build on. We have a lot planned for what $CRUSH will be able to do beyond earning and trading. Stay tuned.

How You Earn

Crush gives you multiple ways to contribute and earn, each capturing a different type of data that buyers need.

Receipts and Card Linking

Submit receipts through the Crush app or link your payment cards for automatic transaction capture. This generates spending data: what you bought, where, how often, and for how much. Card linking is passive. After the initial setup, you earn with zero effort.

In-Store Shelf Scanning

Photograph product prices on store shelves using the Crush app. When you snap a photo of a price tag or shelf label, the app extracts structured pricing data. Your everyday shopping trips become part of a distributed pricing intelligence network. Coming soon.

Browser Extension

The Crush browser extension captures e-commerce pricing data as you browse online retailers. When you visit a product page, the extension records the product, price, any active promotions, and availability. You earn while you shop online with no extra steps. Coming soon.

The Boost Tab

Beyond contributing data, you can put your $CRUSH tokens to work through the Boost tab. Boosting means staking your tokens into the our onchain staking program. In return, you receive a share of the weekly network emissions.

Every week (called an "epoch"), the Crush protocol calculates the total network activity and mints new $CRUSH tokens. That emission is split: 80% goes to data contributors based on their share of the week's volume, the rest goes to the staking pool for users who are boosting.

Your share of that 20% is proportional to how many tokens you have staked relative to the total pool (all other users). The more you stake and the longer you keep your position active, the larger your weekly share. Boosting signals long-term commitment to the network and unlocks higher reward multipliers over time.

Multipliers

Every user starts with a base 1.0x multiplier. As you use the app and hit milestones, you earn bonuses that increase your effective contribution volume. A higher multiplier means a larger share of the weekly emission, even if your raw data contribution stays the same. For example, if a receipt would normally earn you 1 $CRUSH, a 1.2x multiplier turns that into 1.2 $CRUSH for the same receipt.

Here's how multiplier bonuses stack up:

• Set up your account. Connect a wallet, complete your profile, and finish the onboarding steps to get your first boost.
• Link your cards. Connect debit or credit cards for automatic transaction capture. Each additional account you link increases your multiplier.
• Scan receipts consistently. Every approved receipt counts toward your next tier. The more you accumulate over time, the higher your multiplier climbs.
• Build a daily streak. Upload at least one receipt per day. A 7-day streak earns a higher multiplier than day one. A 30-day streak earns even more.
• Stay boosted. Keep your tokens staked in the Boost tab. Long-term stakers who earn the "Diamond Hands" achievement get an additional multiplier on top of their staking rewards.
• Be active on weekends, scan a receipt or contribute data on Saturday or Sunday to earn a Weekend Warrior badge.
• Level up. All of your activity feeds into your overall level. Each level adds a small multiplier increase, and reaching a level 10 locks in a permanent 1.5x floor. Even if your streak resets, your multiplier never drops below that

All bonuses are additive and the system caps at 1.9x. Two users who scan the same receipt can earn very different rewards. The user with a 1.8x multiplier from consistent daily activity gets nearly twice the tokens as someone at 1.0x.

Refer and Earn

You can refer as many friends and family as you would like to earn and unlimited amount of Crush tokens! All they have to do is download the app and be active on it, then BOOM you get a bonus reward of Crush token airdropped right to your app.

Why Blockchain?

Fair question. You don't need to understand any of this to use Crush. But it's why we can do things that traditional apps can't. There are specific reasons Crush is built on Solana rather than just running a traditional rewards app:

1. You actually own your rewards. On-chain tokens live in your wallet. No company can devalue, expire, or revoke them. That's not a policy. That's how the technology works.
2. The token economics are transparent. The burn rate, emission schedule, and token supply are all publicly verifiable on the blockchain. You don't have to trust us. You can check.
3. It's fast and cheap. Solana settles transactions in under a second for a fraction of a cent, making it possible to pay micro-rewards for individual contributions without fees eating into your earnings.
4. It's built for the next generation of buyers. A new wave of AI agents is emerging that need to discover, evaluate, and pay for consumer data autonomously. No sales meetings, no contracts, just machine-to-machine transactions. New payment protocols like x402 (Coinbase) are making this possible at the HTTP layer, and Crush's Solana-native architecture is designed to work with these rails from day one. A traditional rewards database can't plug into that world. A blockchain-native token can.
5. It unlocks things points can't. A centralized points ledger can handle simple cash-back, but that's where it ends. An onchain token is a building block. It can power transparent burn mechanics, distribute value back to contributors automatically, and support entirely new product categories that would be impossible with proprietary points.

Security and Privacy

Crush collects transaction data: what you bought, where, and how much you paid. We do not sell personal identifiers like your name, address, or payment and card numbers. When you link a card, we receive transaction details but never your login credentials or full credit card number, and all data is encrypted and anonymous.

Before any data reaches a buyer, it goes through an anonymization and aggregation process. Individual transactions are stripped of identifying information and combined with thousands of others to create statistical data sets. A brand purchasing Crush sees, for example, that 12,000 users in the Midwest bought oat milk in March. They never see that you specifically bought oat milk at Kroger on March 14th.

Your wallet, your tokens, and your contribution history are yours. Crush cannot freeze your tokens, revoke your rewards, or lock you out of earnings; that is enforced by the Solana blockchain, not a company policy that could change tomorrow. If you want to stop contributing at any time, you can unlink your card, stop scanning your existing Crush days in your wallet. There's no penalty for leaving and nothing to forfeit

Why Now?

The consumer insights industry hasn't changed in decades. Legacy providers charge six figures for data that arrives weeks late. The consumers who generate it get almost nothing. Receipt-scanning apps built massive businesses on this gap, but kept the same lopsided economics with just a friendlier interface.

What's different now is that the infrastructure exists to do it properly. Blockchain technology has matured to the point where micro-rewards are fast, cheap, and user-friendly.

At the same time, a massive shift is happening in how data gets bought and sold. AI agents, autonomous software that shops, compares prices, and makes purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers and businesses, are becoming a real force in commerce. Bain & Co. projects that $300B–$500B in U.S. commerce will flow through autonomous AI agents by 2030, and every major research firm identifies grocery and CPG as the fastest-adopting category. These agents need real-time consumer and pricing data to function, and they need to discover and pay for it programmatically, without sitting through a sales cycle. That's an entirely new category of demand for exactly the kind of data Crush collects, and legacy providers simply aren't built to serve it.

The result is a network where everyone wins. Contributors own their data and earn real value for sharing it. Brands get fresher, cheaper, more complete insights. And the token economy aligns everyone's incentives through a transparent mechanism that rewards the people who make it all possible.

Getting Started

Getting set up takes about two minutes:

1. Download the app. Crush is available on iOS and soon on Android.
2. Search Crush Rewards in the App Store.
3. Create your account using only your phone number.
4. Once logged in, the app creates a Solana wallet for you automatically. You don't need to understand crypto wallets or manage seed phrase; it all just works in the background thanks to our partners at Privy.
5. Link a card or scan a receipt. Connect a debit or credit card for passive automatic earnings, and snap a photo of your next grocery receipt to start earning Crush immediately.
6. Try boosting your tokens. Once you have Crush in your account, head to the Boost tab and stake them to start earning weekly missions on top of your data contributions.

That's it: no minimum balance to start, no waiting period, and no points that expire while you figure things out

Download the app to start earning.

Want to learn more or talk to us? Join our Discord community.