As you know, at Winding Tree our modus operandi is transparency and collaboration, and therefore we welcome feedback and constructive criticism. With this article, I would like to answer questions and comments from Douglas Quinby (senior analyst at Phocuswright), Ian C. (founder of Travel Massive) and Fritz Oberhummer (Senior Manager at Expedia Affiliate Network).

Before I dive into it, I would like to thank all the people and organizations that continue supporting our vision. First of all, it’s our backers. As of the time of writing this article they have contributed a mind-boggling 10,000 ETH towards our cause. …

We were working hard these past months on making sure we have a successful Token Generation Event.

As you know, we have closed a few new partnerships, including Lufthansa Group (6 airlines), Air New Zealand and Nordic Choice Hotels. We have a few conversations with hotel chains and airlines (which is our focus for now), and we have a lot of interest from hundreds of companies from all areas of travel, but we don’t have resources to deal with them at the time (sorry guys!).

We also have been contacted by all sorts of intermediaries and wannabe middlemen, like payment…

Over the course of the past few weeks, we were in constant communication with our legal advisors in Switzerland over the press release that was issued by FINMA (Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority). We consider that the position taken by FINMA is a positive development in the regulatory landscape, which will help the public to distinguish between good blockchain projects and the noise. In order to ensure that our TGE is conducted in a way that is fully compliant with Swiss law, we have decided to obtain a formal ruling of the Swiss authority prior to commencing the TGE. Unfortunately…

Many people are confused by the novelty of the Winding Tree offering and in this short article I would like to clarify what we do, why and how.

Goal: Fostering Innovation in the Travel Industry

Winding Tree is more like a movement than a company. Legally, Winding Tree is a non-profit organization that pursues one goal: to foster innovation in the travel industry. Along with Travel Tech Con, Winding Tree goal is not to make a profit, but rather to enable innovation in travel through various collaborative projects. We are convinced that without open data innovation in the travel industry won’t be possible, therefore the first project…

Following on the brilliant article from Trond Vidar Bjorøy, I’d like to elaborate on the points Trond outlined in his article. Trond, thank you for your clarifications and comments on this text!

Overbooking

Blockchain’s ability to prevent double spending could, in theory, remove the problem of double bookings in the industry, which would hopefully (for both passengers and airlines) eliminate instances like this from happening.

One of the companies that I founded a while ago was Walksource. It aimed to solve the problem of overbooking at hotels and I know for sure that hotels and other travel companies will never stop…

Is business travel really one of the first markets that needs decentralized applications? 🤔

First of all Winding Tree is not tackling “business travel” but rather the distribution aspect of travel. Every time you book a hotel or airline under today’s architecture there are multiple parties involved in the transaction, which creates double marginalization and inflates prices for essentially just moving data around. When you book a flight from a travel agency, that travel agency sources their booking from a GDS (Global Distribution System), and the GDS is connected directly into the airline to keep its prices and availability up-to-date…

In the past few months, the amount of money raised through so-called ICOs (aka token sale, token distribution or token generation event, etc.) has surpassed other ways of funding early stage startups. While many of them are a scam and for some of them the token model doesn’t make any sense, a few business models require a token sale.

There are two reasons to do a token sale. In the first one, the token sale is just an instrument to raise funding from people all over the world. While it is definitely possible to simply issue a token and put…

I originally presented the ideas that I describe below at TheBlockchain.NZ conference on May 8th, 2017.

Over the past few months I’ve heard enough talk about private and consortium blockchains. It baffles me still that many people take private blockchains seriously. Blockchains were fundamentally designed to remove middlemen from our affairs. If you don’t agree, please read Satoshi’s white paper. You don’t even have to read it all, it’s all on the first page. It’s already been sung, but it can’t be said enough:

Once again, the ultimate feature of blockchains is that they do not allow…