As a competitor to online peer-to-peer accommodation sharing platform Airbnb, Tripio improves upon the existing ecosystem by building a fully decentralized home sharing economy platform. Tripio aims to provide a peer-to-peer travel marketplace that connects global customers with service providers. The platform is focused on transparency, tamper-resistant trust and an incentives program based on its native TRIO token.
Tripio has a global database of 450,000 hotels, homestays and lodgings where users can choose from. The total amount of daily bookings averages around 300.
At Tripio, service providers can add specific terms and conditions by implementing a smart contract.
HADAX exchange listing
Tripio recently participated in the HADAX community coin vote. Huobi Autonomous Digital Asset Exchange, HADAX is a subsidiary of Huobi Group, that focusses on community interaction. HADAX recently upgraded their platform to HADAX 2.0. After the first round of the new community vote, Tripio was announced a winner and got awarded with an exchange listing on HADAX. Tripio received over 50% more votes than expected. The listing on HADAX of Tripio’s TRIO token will commence at the 11th of September, as of now deposits can be made.
Current Travel Industry issues
There are certain credit risks between users and service providers. For instance, a user can dispute a transaction and have the credit agency charge-back the paid amount or a user can be faced with having to pay a price surge after arriving a hotel that has overbooked its standard rooms.
According to research studies, around 20% of all travel industry reviews are fake. This is a big concern as a lot of bookings are based of off their reviews. People can become very disappointed if an accommodation is far from what they expected.
Online Travel Agency (OTA) fees can run up to 10–30% commission plus an extra 3% transaction fee to cover credit card or cross-border bank wire fees.
Tripio’s Travel Industry solutions
Decentralized data regarding suppliers and users will be safely stored using IPFS files.
Anti-cheating technology based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be implemented into the ecosystem by introducing a context classification model called Bag of Words (BoW). This model is specifically designed to recognize false comments.
At Tripio, users and service providers do not pay commissions. The only fee that needs to be paid is the currency conversion fee of between 1–3%. The absence of commission fees will save both parties between 10–30%.
Institutional Investors
Tripio has a wide range of professional entities that invested in Tripio early on. These funds include: OK Blockchain Capital, BlockVC, FreeSFund, Genesis Capital, INBlockchain, Ceyuan Ventures, Node Capital, TRON Foundation and Blue Ridge Capital. I will highlight two of these investment funds.
Node Capital: Node Capital is a venture capital firm that invests mainly in high-potential blockchain projects. Node Capital is known for being one of the first VC’s focused on blockchain projects. Co-founded by Jun Su, also known as one of the co-founders of Huobi, Node Capital is based in Beijing and has invested in more than 160 blockchain projects. Some of these projects are: Gifto, FCoin, IOSt and Zilliqa.
FreeSFund: FreeS Fund is a venture capital firm located in both the US and China, which focusses on investing in blockchain projects in their early stages as well as the growth stage. FreeS is mainly interested in investing in companies that are either TMT (Technology-Media-Telecom), business-to-business (B2B) or deep-technology based.
My personal opinion
Booking platforms are known to charge their accommodation providers up to 50% in fees, leaving them with an extreme small profit margin for opening up their home, hotel or lodging to complete strangers. I like the fact that Tripio is aiming to change that.
They have a track record of achieving 300 bookings a day on average.
Some of my concerns however are: Why did they launch a token as they have run a successful business from 2015 onwards? I have concerns about the price volatility of the TRIO token that is used as a payment vehicle on their website. With a price decline of 90% in the last 4 months (since its exchange launch), it might not be a great fit as a currency at the moment. On a side-note, you can also pay with other cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH and LTC or with fiat money.
Tripio will be listed on HADAX on the 11th of September. If you want to trade Tripio but you do not have an account on HADAX yet, you can sign up using this link. You can also use your verified HADAX account to trade on Huobi Global.
For more information on Tripio, here are their official channels:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thetripio
Website: https://trip.io/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tripio
Medium: https://medium.com/@thetripio
Here is an informational video on YouTube about Tripio:
Disclaimer: This article is not intended as investment advice. It is just my personal opinion about Tripio and HADAX. You should always do your own research #DYOR. Huobi Global incentivizes me for writing this article and encourages me to express my own opinions.
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