13 Questions You Needed Answered About The Winding Tree ICO / Token Sale

1. How is Winding Tree different from Lockchain?

In a nutshell they don't have anything in common. Lockhain is an OTA which charges a monthly fee to list on their platform.

"Advanced blockchain technology and the use of a native token will allow us to operate at effectiveness which is unmatched by any other accommodation provider in the industry. This will allow us to cut out all commissions on revenue and focus on providing value driven service for a fixed monthly fee" (https://web.archive.org/web/20180204185937/https://lockchain.co/FAQ.html)

Lockchain sold tokens which are merely a gift card you can use on their platform. Their tokens are standard ERC20 tokens which are only able to transfer value. They are essentially a very volatile gift card you can use only on their website. The team retained 50% of all tokens in circulation and as far as I'm aware there is no vesting schedule in the smart contracts.

Winding Tree instead operates on ERC827 tokens, which we created, and are now part of the core library of Zeppelin OS.

A booking going through lockchain, as far as I'm aware, does not even touch the blockchain, as you can just pay with credit card through their website. They have no blockchain explorer where you can see the suppliers of inventory, they merely use a default explorer to show token transfership.

Economically speaking, competing with Expedia and Priceline on marketing with a "monthly fee" (wait I thought it was free?) seems very unlikely, it has been tried and the need for blockchain here is beyond me.

You mention Lockchain are the first open-source blockchain for travel. 1) Winding Tree was first proposed as an academic project in 2015, under the name of OpenRes 2) Lockchain is not open-source, as I mentioned above the booking doesn't even go through the blockhain - but then again, I tried recently and booking doesn't even work. They've been confronted about this multiple times and will call people who confront them about this FUDers. But just show the code. Here is ours: https://github.com/windingtree

Winding Tree is a protocol that enables startups and developers to source inventory from all suppliers on the platform through one simple data standard. The blockchain allows for this infrastructure to be self-hosted and brings the decentralization aspect to it. Therefore, in 4 years time we cannot simply introduce a commission.

2. How will travel search be implemented on Winding Tree?

We are currently building the API to handle the search. We're an open-source project and already receive contributions from the open-source community, this is what we mean by "it will be developed by software engineers". Some engineers building a travel app on top of Winding Tree might find better solutions to our algorithm and propose these as PR to the main repo. Our partners i.e. Air New Zealand have also committed development resources to the project and are also working on open-source code, which includes search.

3. Why does Winding Tree claim there won’t be transaction fees, when in fact there are?

Now here we have to differentiate between network fees and commissions by Winding Tree. The quotes are taken out of context from a 24 page paper. Winding Tree doesn't and never will charge transaction fees for anything happening on the blockchain. However, blockchains themselves run on mining fees, these are network fees paid to people contributing their computational power to the network and keeping it safe. Every blockchain has network fees, yes even IOTA.

Transaction fees variate depending on use of the platform. The Casper protocol update, expected to come to Ethereum this summer, introduces hybrid PoS with the goal of switching to PoS fully down the road. Once PoS is in place, Plasma and Sharing are possible which create enough scalability. (PoS = Proof of Stake, see: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ)

Also most importantly, individual transactions do not require a transaction fee as these happen in the state channel, more to that later.

4. How will the Winding Tree architecture actually handle bundling?

As the end goal is to have the different types of inventory under one standard, once you book a flight from DXB to LIS you can automatically query hotels in LIS and ancillaries at DXB and LIS.

5. What is the “state channel”?

State Channel technology is a blockchain technology which allows for scalability, privacy, and instant transactions off-chain. State channels are cryptographically secured to the blockchain yet can handle large amounts of volume without incurring transaction fees. See: https://medium.com/l4-media/generalized-state-channels-on-ethereum-de0357f5fb44

Suppliers don't want everyone to see their availability and pricing. "Inventory is all we have" they say. They don't want to give that away. So every request actually opens a state channel with the supplier where they can feed you responses to your requests, as if they were receiving a request through their direct website, yet the requestor gets responses from multilpe airlines with one call.

6. Will LIF tokens ever be subject to regulatory and legal protections? (And if not - what protection will buyers and sellers have to be confident in the platform?)

Lif it a pure utility token. Your criticism about Lif, if it were in place would make Lif a security, which doesn't make sense for the platform and is neither desired. The protection for buyers, as we make extremely clear in the T&Cs and in our social channels is zero. Just the same when doing an angel investment, your guarantee is zero.

7. Why can’t US and Chinese citizens participate in the ICO?

We only ban U.S. citizens to participate, this is solely due to SEC statements around ICOs. It's certainly not our intention to ban them, hence, loose potential funding. This is totally out of our control and is done by every ICO.

8. Who owns the intellectual property of the smart contracts and source code?

As you can see from our GitHub repo all code is released as open-source.

9. What is stopping rogue players from manipulating the price and ownernership of LIF on the market?

For what advantage? If people buy a lot of Lif to destroy the project they would bear an enormous cost as tokens are divisible up to 18 decimals. What is the economic advantage to do so?

10. How will the Ethereum that is raised via the LIF token sale be used?

To build the whole infrastructure and potentially fund third-party projects looking to build open-source dapps on top Winding Tree. We will have transparent accounting and publish financial results at regular intervals.

11. How will the “community” vote on the proposals?

This is from a dated whitepaper. Due to securities regulation token holders cannot vote on proposals of the platform. However, anyone can propose changes and updates by doing PR to the main repo. The former part might change depending on the regulatory landscape around the world.

12. Is Don Birch, former CEO of Abacus International involved in the incorporation of Winding Tree?

Switzerland requires a Swiss national to open a Foundation. Don who has been extremely supportive of the project has helped us set-up the foundation and has also been involved in the project. Don has not taken on any tokens as he himself is very critical of ICOs and tokens, yet a strong supporter of the distribution protocol we propose. Due to the move to Gibraltar he is currently deciding whether to stay involved.

13. Where is Winding Tree incorporated?

The company issuing the Lif tokens is incorporated in Gibraltar as Winding Tree Limited. It's a company limited by guarantee, a non-profit. We've gone into detail about why moving around etc. but it's mostly boring legal reasons. If anyone is interested they can check our blog.

Cheers,

Dave