From AARP Cards to On-Chain Credentials: The Discount Economy Needs Wallet Auth

You flash your AARP card at Hertz and save 25%. You show your military ID at Home Depot and get 10% off. Your kid logs in with a .edu email and pays half price for Spotify. This is eligibility verification. It is a $300 billion economy built on plastic cards, manual checks, and databases that do not talk to each other. It works today because a human is standing at the counter. It breaks completely the moment an AI agent shops for you instead. The discount economy is enormous and invisible Eligibility-based discounts are everywhere. AARP has 38 million members with discounts at over 100,000 businesses. Home Depot, Lowe's, Under Armour, and Apple all offer military discounts verified through ID.me. Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Apple Music cut prices in half for students verified through UNiDAYS or SheerID. AAA members get preferred rates at Hertz, Hilton, and thousands of other merchants. None of this runs on a shared standard. AARP has its own card. ID.me has its own database. UNiDAYS has