Technical Update

TL;DR: see the code related to this update on GitHub: https://github.com/windingtree/wiki/blob/master/dev-updates/2018-Q2.md.

Hotel Distribution Architecture

Hotel distribution architecture was the most significant milestone of the past quarter. The central piece (no pun intended) of the first version of the platform is called “Index.” It is a smart contract from which you can get a list of URIs where you can access the hotel information, availability and pricing. They are protocol-agnostic (it could be a HTTP server, a distributed database, a firebase instance), but the data output must be in conformance with the data exchange standards we’re working on. Jiri wrote about it here.

Data Structure

Last month, Jiri Chadima reviewed current industry data formats. Based on that, we designed the first version of our data structures. More on it here.

Distributed Databases

None of the distributed database solutions we’ve seen to date are fast enough to handle data that changes frequently (let’s call it “quick data”). We think that some projects have the potential to handle this task though. E.g. there is a proposal for “modifiable documents” on Swarm, but we have yet to see it in action. A very straightforward solution for delivering the quick data is to do it via your own web server (e.g. AWS or on-premises).

Events

Earlier this year we attended ETH Buenos Aires hackathon, as well as ZepCon0 organized by our friends from Zeppelin. Our hacker team built a solution for smart contracts to access information off the blockchain called Pluracle.

At Zepcon0 we saw Zeppelin team present their upgradeability library and kernel for smart contracts. The following week we updated our lif-token repository to use the zos-lib.

At the beginning of June, our team got together at Travel Tech Con in San Francisco, one of the open innovation initiatives the Winding Tree Foundation is supporting. Over the three days of the conference, we got to connect with an awesome community of fellow travel tech startups, technologists and engineers to lead the discussions on open innovation and blockchain in travel. Our team also delivered the first hands-on workshop on decentralized travel distribution, shared our vision on the innovation in travel, and consulted travel tech startups on blockchain-based distribution and Winding Tree platform.

We have a section on our website where you can see all of the upcoming (and past) events we’re participating in.

Partners

We hosted workshops with hotel chains, airlines and other travel companies where they explored our current tech stack and how can we leverage our partners’ expertise and resources.

Some of the partnerships we announced in Q2 include: Swissport, eRevMax, and Sciant.

Whats Next

We will release the first version of the WT network in Q3, deployed on testnet and mainnet. We call it the “WT Summer Release”. You can follow the progress of the project here: https://github.com/orgs/windingtree/projects/1.

We will be releasing two dapps: Crypto Bookings and a WT Explorer, both of which use our decentralized infrastructure.

We’re organizing our first hackathon in Prague, just before DevCon (Oct 24–25). This is your chance to learn directly from Winding Tree team, to build your first hack on blockchain using our APIs, and to join our growing open-source community. Details are coming soon, subscribe to our newsletter to be among the first to receive full details and get your invite to join the hackathon.

Action Items

Are you a software engineer at a travel company and you tired of debugging XML APIs code? Join the revolution here: https://github.com/windingtree.