The Road Map for 2021 — Part 2
AIRBNB IS NOT THE POINT
Creating an alternative to Airbnb or Booking is not the point anymore.
That will happen as an emergent phenomenon, by itself.
How many times I was told:
- «You want to beat the OTAs? This is impossible”
Now I am more confident than ever because I realized we won’t need to “beat them”.
We never wanted to beat them, actually, we always wanted to offer a fair alternative.
And now I know this will happen.
So my answer is:
- «We won’t. The internet will”.
The idea of creating a decentralized OTA was reflexive thinking: you try to improve on what you know, because you can’t imagine what you don’t know.
As much as in 1997 saying «the internet will allow sending 10.000 faxes a minute! Think about that!» was completely missing the point.
The open blockchain ecosystem will allow us to do much more than simply provide alternatives to centralized booking platforms.
We will be able to completely change the game.
Platforms will still be there but only for some uses cases.
Look at how Binance and other Cex now have been reduced to cheaper and faster alternatives to Uniswap: “they are great when ETH gas are too high”.
Not long ago they used to be the ONLY way for ALL use cases.
Their supremacy has gone, in a matter of months.
Evaporated under the heat of a superior framework.
Once you have used Uniswap and understood its magic, you are just starting to grasp what’s coming for so many companies in so many industries.
A year ago that would have been unthinkable.
And Uniswap has just started.
SO, WHAT’S THE POINT OF TRIPS COMMUNITY?
Opening a crack in the dam.
Hosts, Property Managers and companies in the space are increasingly aware that they are stuck in a risky situation, where too much power lays in the OTAs hands.
They have no real exit and need to conform.
We want to offer an exit. Small at first and then increasingly wider.
So we are basically helping the industry to transition the new internet and this means that:
- Guest paying 10–20% commissions (and often not even knowing it) will be a thing of the past.
- People’s and companies’ reputation owned by corporations won’t be acceptable anymore.
- Hosts held hostage by them will finally be perceived as what it is: a new form of feudalism.
The whole space will be set free by new open roads and free bridges, while today’s castles are forgotten on some hill with all the siloed data rotting away.
It’s going to be Public Goods eating corporations.
I know, it doesn’t feel like this when an Ethereum transaction costs $10, but it didn’t feel like this neither when it took us 5 minutes to download a 1 MB picture.
The only question in my mind is not if, it’s when.
WE ARE EARLY AND HAVE AN HEDGE
The complete infrastructure inversion will take a long time, around 5 to 10 years in my opinion.
In 2021, we will probably see the first native applications and real world changes.
Few will use them this year as we don’t expect the average Host to get in.
Which is good, as it gives us the time to build and test.
I constantly underestimate how early I am: blogs, digital cameras, digital nomads and Airbnb in 2001, travel coach in 2002, co-livings in 2003 and Bitcoin in 2013.
Add to the list decentralized bookings in 2017.
I always think we are a couple of years away from mass adoption, while often we are 5 to 10 years away in fact.
I overestimate the masses.
After three years of preaching the blockchain to the travel world, I realized that many are interested but no one really cares.
This whole blockchain thing is just too distant for them.
Why? Well, because there’s nothing they can do with it.
Why? Because there IS nothing.
The most advanced real world applications the blockchain has produced so far are Bitcoin, stable coins, tokens and DeFi.
Can you do something with them in travel? No, you can’t.
So, why bother?
Rather than going back to convince the travel world that everything will change, we should build something they can actually use.
We couldn’t do that before, we can start doing this now.
