Thread by @kulkarninikhil

It has been almost 10 months since I and @Prak_ap had the first ever discussion on the idea of @buktrips.
Here's a twitter thread with 10 points which cover the story (till date) and the future of BUK as we have imagined.

1/ From the beginning we imagined BUK as the protocol and buk (note lowercase) as the service. If this sounds confusing, read the next 4 tweets.

2/ The BUK protocol is a family of smart contracts which enable tokenization of hotel room nights inventory. This tokenization leads to many advantages which this thread expands on

https://twitter.com/buktrips/status/1538068979054309376

3/ While our long term expectation is for the web3 developer community to leverage the BUK protocol and build dApps on top of, we will be building the initial set of services under the buk (lowercase) prefix, as proof-of-concept and also to kickstart the dApp ecosystem.

4/ buktrips.com is the first ever dApp being built on top of the BUK protocol. buktrips.com is the booking engine where users book hotels by paying in USDC. The entire transaction is recorded on the blockchain and users get their booking in form of an NFT

5/ Other dApps in our roadmap include hotel room-night marketplace, price prediction engine and revenue projection analytics. We don't intend to build all of these, rather expect developers to build them and imagine many more.

6/ Iterations of BUK: We are currently in, what we internally called v3 and what is now available as the Alpha.
6-1/ 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.

6-2/ 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.

6-3/ 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.

6-4/ The current iteration gets 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.

6-5/ If you want to check out this version, you can participate in our Alpha test

https://twitter.com/buktrips/status/1626246248025198592

7/ Up until now, buktrips.com and the BUK protocol have been developed hand-in-hand with each iteration of BUK protocol, also marking changes in buktrips.com.

8/ This trend will continue for the next version as well, when we enable real world tradable bookings. After this, the protocol and services, are expected to diverge in their development roadmap.

This is where the flywheel starts rotating.

9/ Once the flywheel starts, BUK and buk initiatives diverge:

1. BUK Protocol: make the flywheel bigger - add more supply and more demand; make it easy for web2 users & become the segue to onboard the next billion users to web3

2. buk services: flywheel goes faster .... [contd]

9/ [contd...]
2. buk services: make the flywheel go faster - add new products that will increase adoption.

To wrap up, here are a 10 product ideas which we plan / wish / want to see built on top of the protocol.

10/1 Proof of Stay: NFTs will act as the proof of your booking, but also act as the proof of your stay so that you avoid scenarios like the quoted tweet.
At the same time, we plan to utilize #ZKP to provide proof of stay, with on-chain privacy for all our users.

https://twitter.com/buktrips/status/1610707611825090561

10/2 Verified Reviews: Reviews will be linked to the Proof of Stay NFTs. Why you ask - we answered it here:

https://twitter.com/buktrips/status/1612883620255109120

10/3 Room-night NFT marketplace - a marketplace for trading room nights for specific destinations and specific occasions such as event and conferences or holidays and weddings

https://twitter.com/buktrips/status/1612180249885970432

10/4 Vacation planning - where a bot sources pricing information for multiple destinations from the listed NFTs and provides alternative options within given budgets to users

https://twitter.com/buktrips/status/1613260015741317122

10/5 Open SDKs / APIs, for anyone to access inventory on the BUK protocol or feed into the protocol, provided they have permission from the source Hotels. Coupled with DID / on-chain-KYB this will enable hotels to source tech openly from anyone in a trustless manner

10/6 Contracting marketplace: Imagine a wedding planner from Fiji wanting to organize a destination wedding in resorts of Maldives, Seychelles or Mauritius. With BUK protocol open APIs, Developers can help such planners to access pre-contracted curated rates for bookings easily

10/7 Defi lending: Hotel room inventory is an asset for the hotel, as well as for the current holder of the inventory. So apart from trading, it can also be leveraged as a real asset - mortgaged and loaned funds against.

10/8 Self service kiosks: Instead of over the counter check-in, imagine you just scanned your NFT QR code at a reception kiosk and thanks to DID integration with your wallet, you got instant access to your room in the hotel. Sounds crazy easy? Lets work together & make it happen

10/9 Hotel content enrichment: Imagine if hotels could pay you to post your trip photos and promoting the property? Imagine instead of commissioning content creators for promotional videos, hotels had the option to source them from their guests? Possible with ProofOfStay NFTs!

10/10 Corporate rates via NFTs - Imagine Soul Bound NFTs which corporates distribute to their employees to give access to the corporate rate card with hotels? NFTs not only make it possible to get access, they also prevent pilferage of such preferential rates to non-members.

There's so much more to write about the endless possibilities that tokenizing hotel room nights creates. But let us call it a wrap for now!