Winding Tree is Winding Down

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2024-12-24 23:30:02

Winding Tree was an attempt to establish a platform that would connect travel suppliers and sellers in a way that would not put Winding Tree into a monopolistic position if the experiment succeeded. The way to achieve this goal was to build open-source systems that could not be coopted by the incumbents.

The results of this experiment are a slew of other projects that follow in our footsteps, as well as the open-source codebase of our experimentations and working prototypes.

The project is now frozen, since we could not reach a product-market fit. Our hope is that others will succeed where we failed. The following text is an attempt to help them.

After years of dedicated effort, we've decided to close the Winding Tree project. This decision was primarily influenced by the crypto industry's unpreparedness and the need for more understanding and trust in blockchains within the travel sector.

At the beginning of Winding Tree, there were two main problems: crypto wasn't ready, and the travel industry needed to understand and trust blockchains. We were hopeful about crypto, and our job was to educate people in travel. Crypto had evolved, but, unfortunately, orthogonally to our use case. At the same time, our attempts to educate travel executives weren't sufficient. A coordinated effort of travel companies is required for something like Winding Tree to thrive. Still, even in 2024, only a few people understand its proposition. We attacked the problem from different angles: B2B, B2C, identity management, etc. We worked unwaveringly towards the goals in the white paper, but ultimately, we failed to find a product market fit. The founding team still firmly believes that our ideas hold true. What's not right is the timing.