Buktrips Developer Update #1

3 min readMar 9, 2023

Hello World!

console.log(“Hello World”);

Since the last 5 months, our devs have kept busy creating the Alpha version of buktrips.com. This version has been built ground up with new UI stack as well as backend architecture.

Before we go into more details of the current build, let’s talk about iterations of buktrips.com.

Iterations of Buktrips

We are currently in, what we internally called v3 and what is now available as the Alpha. Our first iteration was a skeletal product which demonstrated how hotels could register their inventory on BUK protocol, and how every booking would be tokenized.

Our second iteration was a mock booking engine which not only minted room-night NFTs, but also demonstrated how they could be listed on a marketplace and resold to others. v2 not only showed the technical feasibility of the resale on the smart contact, it also demonstrated how a hotel booking engine UI could be extended for basic marketplace functionality.

With this version things real — it is no longer a demonstration but an actual booking engine. With Expedia as our supply partner, with this version you can book a hotel in any part of the world, by paying in USDC and get your booking in form of an NFT. So let’s dive in to check details of what kept the team busy.

Integration of Expedia Inventory

The integration of Expedia inventory is the major update for this version. This integration will allow users to access global inventory of across 500k hotels, as well as accurate pricing and availability. Expedia is one of the largest travel booking APIs in the world, and this integration will give users access to their entire inventory of hotels.

Paying with Crypto Assets

Another major update for this version is the ability for users to login using their web3 wallets and pay with USDC stored in those wallets. This update is in line with the increasing popularity of stable coins and will allow users to pay for their hotel bookings with digital currencies — we currently support USDC but are actively working on including other tokens as well. This will provide users with more payment options and will make the booking process more streamlined.

Intuitive User Experience

Another focus for our developers in the alpha was also focus on providing a user experience as close as any mainstream (read web2) hotel booking portal. So the experience on buktrips.com will be identical to any other booking process, except that it will add web3 functionality of bookings minted as NFTs to the booking lifecycle.

TLDR;

In summary, the integration of Expedia inventory and the ability to pay with USDC are major updates for this version. We look forward to seeing these updates in action and are excited to see what the future holds for buktrips.com.

About Buk

BUK is a decentralized, open chain globally accessible protocol, making the conventional hotel inventory distribution and booking experience more flexible and decentralized to benefit all stakeholders — travellers, hotel owners and even middlemen who trade these inventory.

With BUK, every room for each night is a Non Fungible Token which represents the right to stay in that particular room of that hotel for a specific night. However, unlike a traditional booking this token that represents your buking- can be traded and sold to someone else. This offers tremendous flexibility with hotels and intermediaries collecting commissions from these trades. This also opens up major opportunities for better price discovery and timelines that would have once been impossible. With trades and transactions stored securely on the blockchain, participants can benefit from full transparency.

With its standalone protocol layer, BUK paves way for further innovation as developers are able to create their own applications on top of it. Get instant on-chain payouts when your bukings are sold to someone else.

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