The big players in the aviation industry are quite eager to use blockchain for day-to-day use cases to make their operations more efficient. In a recent move, Etihad Airways has teamed up with Winding Tree, a blockchain platform targeting the travel industry. The primary goal of this partnership is to explore and implement use cases for making the airline’s distribution more swift.

With that move, Etihad has now joined the elite club of World’s top airlines using the Winding Tree platform, including KLM, Air Canada, Lufthansa, and Air France. As a result, transaction and operational costs for every stakeholder in the process are expected to be reduced greatly. Moreover, they will also be able to manage and share inventory details publicly and collaborate at a much larger scale.

Officials from both sides of the deal, Etihad Airways and Winding Tree, are keen to bringing disruption in the market. Although they are primarily looking to serve distribution-related use cases, it might lead towards a fully ‘blockchain-empowered’ industry in a couple of years. Since the current niche is dominated by a monopoly of major distribution systems, Winding Tree aims to bring the real sense of decentralization among all the participants. This step will further diminish the cost for end-users and allow the airline to grow its operations.

It is worth noticing that Winding Tree’s blockchain is a fully public ledger and the API is also available to all partners, allowing them to build customized solutions while taking advantage of blockchain’s inherent features (e.g. data integrity, provenance, etc).

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