How two Frenchmen want to break the monopoly of online booking platforms with blockchain

Content published on www.forbes.fr

Well versed in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, the pair formed by Vidal Chriqui, a graduate of the École des Mines de Paris, and Hervé Hababou, entrepreneur and software engineer, have decided to take on the monopoly of online booking platforms. The first step in this "battle", named "BTU Protocol" after the first open source decentralised booking protocol: the issue, from this Tuesday morning, of 50 million tokens in order to build a genuine "community". And so to work towards a more virtuous rebalancing of the market through blockchain. Here is how.

Booking, Expedia, Lastminute.com: various online booking platforms much used by the French when they want to book their holidays or simply get away for a weekend. Yet behind this "fast and effective" service lies a slightly more nuanced reality. Namely a vast monopoly on the part of those platforms, which impose their terms on hoteliers. "Every time I used Booking, for instance, to book a hotel for family coming to visit me, the manager of the establishment strongly advised me not to use their services," explains Vidal Chriqui, one of the two architects of BTU Protocol. According to the European Commission report on the subject, a very large majority of hoteliers are tied, to put it mildly, to these international platforms. Platforms to which these tourism professionals are forced to pay ever higher commissions. "Whatever platform you are on, you depend on the same player," Vidal Chriqui insists. "Our ambition is to put an end to that situation and create the conditions for a more virtuous market," adds BTU Protocol's co-founder, Hervé Hababou.

He sets out the battle plan: "Booking is a platform that both lists hotel availability and manages the users. Our aim is to split those two sides through blockchain, which will make it possible to store hotel availability in a less opaque way," says BTU Protocol's president. The "inventory", the data in other words, becomes free and accessible to as many people as possible. That means anyone has full latitude to become, in a sense, their own booking platform. From the dabbling blogger to the more accomplished developer. "To that end we offer a disruption kit that acts as a pick and shovel, letting anyone consume this inventory. There will be something for every level. If you are a developer and want to build a more advanced integration, you will of course be able to," Vidal Chriqui says. This full-scale democratisation will reshuffle the cards and break the monopoly of the large intermediaries mentioned above. And above all it will allow fairer payment for service providers, like the hotelier mentioned at the outset.

"As a blockchain expert, it seemed obvious"

It was that hotelier's shrewd remark that let Vidal Chriqui refine and hone this inventive and resolutely ambitious idea. "As a blockchain expert, it quickly clicked in my head," recalls a man for whom the arrival of Bitcoin was a revelation, to the point of working on the question from 2012, before later encountering Ethereum, chief heir to the cryptocurrency "star". It is on the Ethereum network that BTU Protocol will be launched, under the name ERC-808. "We worked a great deal with the Ethereum community to put this protocol in place," says Hervé Hababou. Beyond these technical considerations, the birth of a community remains the salient point in whether the operation succeeds. To that end, BTU Protocol needs fuel: it will be, unsurprisingly given Vidal Chriqui and Hervé Hababou's respective expertise, the token. This digital asset can be transferred between two parties over the internet without needing a third party's agreement. It is more commonly known as the essential cog of "ICOs", the cryptocurrency fundraisings that have flourished in France in recent months. "The token is the gas and the oil of tomorrow. It is a genuine industrial asset. The arrival of the token is comparable to what we lived through 20 years ago with the arrival of the internet," explains Hervé Hababou.

So from this Tuesday morning, 50 million tokens will be issued, until the end of June, with the main aim of raising 20 million euros "and so funding part of our hypergrowth and bringing together this community around our vision," says Vidal Chriqui, but also of building a community able to spread BTU Protocol's vision. All of it manpower needed to take on the giants of online booking platforms. This public presale acts as the "second stage of the BTU Protocol rocket", since it follows a private sale that brought together, with some success, several family offices and investment funds, chief among them Alphanode Capital and Nemapp. "Some of those first institutional buyers are companies that intend to use the protocol," Vidal Chriqui notes. A protocol that, not content with upending the codes of hotel booking platforms, long since ossified, can also be transposed to automotive, retail and healthcare. "The process is the same whether you want to make a doctor's appointment or book a table at a restaurant," says Hervé Hababou. The BTU Protocol community is only waiting for you.

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Exclusive: How two Frenchmen want to break the monopoly of online booking platforms with blockchain