On the surface, Dtravel is a home-sharing platform. Looking deeper, it’s much more.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Greetings OIG community! We have a very special AMA scheduled for today. We have with us Cynthia Huang (Head of Growth) from Dtravel, the next evolution of home sharing — they are creating exciting opportunities to travel and live across the world and all through DeFi!
Please help me in welcoming Cynthia!
Could you please introduce yourself briefly to our OIG community Cynthia? 🙂
Cyn: Hey everyone, thanks for having me and great to be here!
I’m Cynthia, the Head of Growth at Dtravel. I’ve been a home sharing host for over 7 years and co-founded Airhosts Forum as well as a crypto simulation trading game called Altcoin Fantasy. As you can see from my experience, Dtravel really is the most perfect place that combines my passions and skills together so I’m just so excited to be working on something that I’m so passionate about and believe so strongly in.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Thank you for joining us today Cynthia! It is great to see someone with such an experienced background and passion for home sharing, be involved in literally the premier home-sharing project within crypto!
Could you summarize for our community, what exactly is Dtravel?
Cyn: Dtravel is a decentralized, global home sharing community that facilitates accommodation discovery, bookings and payments, with lower fees than other home sharing platforms.
Community members are able to make and receive payments with traditional currencies and popular cryptocurrencies, including the utility token that powers Dtravel: TRVL.
But we’re much more than just a home sharing platform. Dtravel is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO): a community-owned and governed ecosystem that operates for the benefit of its community members, composed of hosts, guests, contributors and TRVL token holders. We have an ambitious and exciting goal of becoming the largest DAO in the world, especially outside of crypto.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Amazing utility within this one ecosystem. It looks like a great opportunity for users who are already in crypto to have a chance to expand into the travel industry which remains largely untouched right now with the exception of a few key projects.
The travel and home sharing industry is a difficult one to navigate, both practically and legally, can you outline for us the experiences and qualifications of your team that you think will ensure this project will be a success?
Cyn: Great question!
I’m extremely proud of our team and who I get to work with. One of the strongest advantages that Dtravel has is its contributors and advisors. We have people who are veterans in the home sharing and travel industries, who are experts in regulations, operations, business development, design and technology. We have entrepreneurs and established executives from blockchain and crypto projects who essentially innovated new mechanisms in the crypto space.
As you can tell from our website and booking app, our design team is world-class and extremely thoughtful about every aspect of all our designs. That’s why Dtravel clearly looks amazing, and stands out obviously from other crypto projects, because of the design talent we have on the team.
Our Product and Tech teams have literally built leading travel companies from the ground up like VN Trip and know how to scale travel companies specifically.
Our Head of BD has extremely strong relationships with the home sharing community and he’s already brought on some amazing partnerships.
We also have an all-star roster of advisors from Expedia, Booking.com, and The Sandbox just to name a few.
We’ll be sharing more highlights of our contributors and advisors over the next while and we’re really excited to have the community see the amazing people contributing to Dtravel.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Incredible team acumen! That was one thing that particularly struck us about the Dtravel project, was how experienced everyone was within their own specialized field. You take a concept like home sharing or “sharing” or any asset, and there are tons of legalities and regulations, and often times they are very localized to the area as well! So very impressive that you have such a good team that is focusing on all of these minor yet important details!
What challenges and problems do you see in the home sharing industry that Dtravel directly addresses, can you outline how you address them?
Cyn: I’m sure this is a question that a lot of people are thinking about — why build a home sharing platform on the blockchain right?
The way I like to think about what we’re solving is making a closed system an open system.
Right now, with the home sharing platforms out there, it’s very much closed systems that need to grant access to people to join. Generally, community participation is limited to using the platform. We’re really trying to change that relationship and be community-driven and community-led.
Practically, what that means is that anyone who wants to participate and help grow the Dtravel ecosystem can do that, whether through using the platform, getting involved through our Support-to-earn program, through voting and governance, through host education, etc.
What’s really interesting is that there’s already a whole ecosystem in the home sharing space but most of the contributors sit outside the platforms. We want to expand the ecosystem and bring in anyone who has the passion, expertise and time to help contribute to Dtravel and get rewarded in turn.
Other problems we’re solving for are:
- intermediation of a platform, which puts hosts and guests at odds with each other
- high fees — we want to reduce fees for all members so that hosts keep more and guests pay less
- value that gets created by the platform users should go back towards the platform users rather than to the platform
- more transparent and neutral dispute resolution
- real tangible benefits and rewards for being an exemplary host or guest
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Love the idea of a support-to-earn model. This ecosystem that your team has built really seeks to restore value back to the users in a way that truly benefits them! And the idea of easily manageable dispute resolution is very well supported!
How difficult will it be to onboard people as hosts and travellers? Do people need to have an understanding of blockchain and crypto to host or use your platform?
Cyn: Dtravel’s target market is really anyone, from those with deep levels of crypto experience to those who are “crypto curious” to those with no prior experience with crypto.
Dtravel’s lower fees and decentralized structure can, and should, appeal to anyone looking for more ownership, flexibility, having a voice and rewards in their experience booking or listing short-term rental properties.
That said, we believe the earliest adopters will likely be hosts and guests who are at least crypto curious.
Since we have a team of contributors who have a lot of experience in home sharing, designing an easy to use and seamless booking experience is key to our product experience, especially on the crypto payments and DAO voting side.
Right now, the booking platform is easy to use, just like any other home sharing platform and we’re accepting crypto payments only but in 2022, we’ll be expanding that to more crypto options as well as fiat payment. We have a goal of becoming the largest DAO in the world so a huge part of achieving that will be making our platform easy to use and pay with crypto for anyone, through a seamless in-app wallet, as well as making it easy for people to participate in the DAO.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very cool, I think you highlighted one of the best selling points of Dtravel. The easy to use and seamless booking experience. We noticed this right away when we visited the Dtravel website, it was extremely easy to use and we think a lot of users will enjoy this service from a UI perspective!
How important is the $TRVL token to the Travel project? What will its utilities be?
Cyn: Yes we definitely love the website and booking experience. If anyone here hasn’t had a chance to check it out, please do because the designs are absolutely stunning. Our designers have done a phenomenal job of the entire user experience.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: https://www.dtravel.com/
🙂
Cyn: In terms of the TRVL token, TRVL is huge and at the centre of everything we do. Truly, it’s what sets us apart because using Web 3.0 technologies, we can do things that aren’t possible with Web 2.0 platforms today.
The TRVL token centers around 4 main areas — travel, loyalty, governance and protection.
Travel:
We wanted to give people more options to pay, including cryptocurrencies. This also extends to giving hosts an option to accept cryptocurrencies as payment. Obviously being a web 3.0 company, we believe in the future of crypto and blockchain and we also believe people should get a choice in how they get paid and how they pay, beyond just fiat.
Loyalty:
We have 4 areas that we’re focusing on that drive loyalty within Dtravel:
- onboarding incentives for hosts and guests
- growth actions for hosts and guests
- airdrops
- support to earn.
The primary goal of the loyalty initiatives is to reward those who contribute to Dtravel’s growth and give people a reason to come back to book on Dtravel through a rewards program. One of the programs we’re really excited about is the Support-to-earn program, which allows anyone in the community to earn rewards by contributing their time and skills towards things like host education and onboarding, support, etc. This will be a game-changer for how DAOs interact with their community members and manage contributions in an organized way.
Governance:
The TRVL token represents stakeholder membership in the Dtravel DAO and enables participation in governance and voting activities that influence how the Dtravel platform is managed. We believe that platforms facilitating bookings between property hosts and guests should be more than a place that just enables transactions.
We want to provide a community where all members are owners and truly have an opportunity to voice their preferences, vote on decisions, and contribute directly toward the growth and success of the entire ecosystem. After all, we believe that there’s no one better to make these decisions and have ownership than those using the platform.
Protection
All hosts are covered by a $1,000,000 USD protection pool which covers property damage for stays booked on Dtravel. We allocate 1% of bookings fees to the protection pool. What’s really exciting about the protection pool is that leveraging the power of Web 3.0, we use DeFi strategies to grow the pool so that it grows over time to offer hosts even more protection.
This is just the beginning. Over time, we’ll have even more use cases and utility for TRVL, including ones that the community comes up with, that we haven’t even thought of today.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Wow. Tons of things to digest here. Thank you for highlighting all of that! You actually just blew my mind with the Support-to-Earn feature. That actually takes community engagement and community building to another level. Please sign me up.
Can you outline the Dtravel DAO for us?
Cyn: The Support-to-earn is definitely one of the things I’m really excited about. For anyone who’s a big NFT gamer and loves the concept of play-to-earn, you’ll definitely love our Support-to-earn program. We’ll have sign ups available soon so I’ll be sure to add you to the list @SaigonXIII 😉.
To answer your question, Dtravel has audacious goals to become one of the largest DAOs operating outside of the crypto-native economy. As Dtravel grows, so will it's level of decentralization for resource allocation and operational functions.
In terms of our governance structure, there are 4 main groups:
- Representative Council
- Governance
- Grants DAO
- Community DAO
Rep Council:
The Representative Council is made up of early contributors and community members with expertise and experience across home sharing platforms, online travel networks, crypto travel platforms, treasury management, DAOs, and tech.
The inaugural Rep Council was elected by the early contributors and there will be elections held for additional members and to replace existing members each Epoch. Details relating to elections and nominations will be made available prior to elections.
Governance:
Since Dtravel is a DAO, community members (TRVL token holders) can choose to participate directly in the development and success of Dtravel by contributing to the dialogue regarding product, platform and ecosystem improvements through governance communication channels; Voting on Dtravel Improvement Proposals (“Dtravel IPs”) or even submitting Dtravel IPs in the future.
Grants DAO:
The Grants DAO will be to facilitate the application, issuance, and reporting of grants to the Dtravel community. The approval of proposals will be decided by the Representative Council. The grant funds will be provided by the Community Treasury.
Community DAO:
The Community DAO is focused on decentralizing and incentivizing workflow within the Dtravel ecosystem. This includes facilitating self-selecting work initiatives, such as Dtravel’s Support-to-Earn initiative, which I’ve mentioned several times because I’m SO excited about this one and how it’s going to change the concept of work and how people work in DAOs.
I highly highly recommend reading our DAO Whitepaper for more information on our DAO structure — https://dao.dtravel.com/. A lot of thought and consideration has been put into the DAO structure and it’s really fascinating for anyone interested in DAO design.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Thank you for providing that! This definitely takes on the subtle intricacies of governance and opens it up for all users within the Dtravel ecoystem. At the end of the day, it creates a major value to hold onto the $TRVL long term! We know many of our community members are very big on investing long-term so this one is a no-brainer!
Finally, where do you envision Dtravel being in the next few years? Can you talk to us about a few of your roadmap and major milestones?
Cyn: For sure!
In case anyone isn’t aware of this yet, Dtravel.com, our new booking platform is already live! We’re starting in some locations and will be adding more cities regularly, which we’ll be announcing each week.
I know a lot of you haven’t been able to travel due to COVID so as you’re booking your next trips, make sure you check out Dtravel! You can pay with crypto and get rewards back for each booking as well so it’s crazy if you don’t book with Dtravel 😉.
We’ll be launching an NFT and I can’t wait to share more details once we’re closer to launching. But it’s the first travel NFT and I for one can’t wait to hopefully snag one before they sell out.
We’ve also got some really exciting partnerships with hosts for next year that we can’t wait to announce! Nigel, our Head of Business Development, has extremely strong relationships with the home sharing community and he’s already brought on some amazing partnerships like the Ministry of Villas and In Residence.
We’re working on tooling for the DAO so that we can start enabling voting, proposals, etc and start getting the community involved in the DAO. Part of that will also be ensuring that we build easy to use tools so that even non-crypto native community members can easily vote on proposals.
Our support-to-earn is something we’re obviously really stoked to launch. That’s really going to be such a game changer for anyone already contributing to the home sharing space or wants to contribute because we’re empowering and enabling people to do that through our ecosystem in a way that isn’t possible with Web 2.0 platforms now.
Lots of things coming on the horizon and I’m so proud of our team of contributors and advisors who are all so passionate and working so hard to realize the vision of enabling community members to build and realize the full potential of a new home sharing experience.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Amazing work @cynb3ar and Dtravel team! You guys are working on all the right things, and we are excited to follow this journey!
Well at this point I’d like to turn it over to our community-led questions on Twitter where we had a great turnout!
Community Twitter Questions:
Twitter Question 1)
Cyn:This is a great question! I love it.
For anyone who’s been in the crypto space for a while, you know that you often have a blockchain solution looking for a problem to solve. In our case, it’s quite the opposite. Having been a host for 7+ years and co-founded one of the largest host forums globally, I’ve contributed a lot of value to the home sharing space and haven’t received anything in return, other than fulfilling my passion to help others in this space.
Imagine now, with Dtravel, I would actually get not only rewarded but also encouraged, to do this. Going back to my earlier comment about open vs. closed systems, with Dtravel, we’re bringing people into the ecosystem who have something to contribute and encouraging and rewarding them for growing Dtravel. This really is just not possible with platforms today, due to being Web 2.0 platforms, which don’t enable these kind of relationships between platforms and their users and communities.
So with Dtravel, we’re enabling much lower fees and giving back rewards plus we’re bringing the community in to get a say and be involved in how our platform evolves. This really is changing the entire paradigm of how platforms interact with their users and this is the promise of Web 3.0 that we’re seeing all across the board. This is why DAOs are becoming so popular and why NFTs are becoming community-driven first, rather than creator first. People are seeking more involvement, more participation and more say. That’s what we’re enabling and capturing. This is already happening in the home-sharing space but we’re giving people a way to now benefit from their contributions and also to have even more involvement than they currently have.
Hope that answers the first question — great one again 😊
Saigon 💎 | OIG: AMAZING stuff!! Love all of this. Enabling the next generation of users. I don’t think we’ll be looking at travelling the same way 😉
Twitter Question 2)
Cyn: I think I’ve addressed some of this in my answer just now to the first question.
Practically speaking, it’s that both hosts and guests have much lower fees compared to other home sharing platforms, which by itself is already a huge benefit.
We also provide rewards for each booking for guests, which again isn’t really a benefit you see. Unlike other rewards programs that are difficult to redeem or convoluted in what you get, we give you TRVL for every booking and you can use that to book or you can transfer out. For anyone who has spent hours on the phone waiting to redeem points for a flight, I hope this resonates with you. This literally just happened to me the other day and I was so frustrated because companies obviously don’t want you to redeem and make it so hard.
Obviously the DAO is huge to what we’re doing and our vision and we’ll be involving the community in building out the platform, especially on the host side.
The TRVL token is another huge component of what we’re building and with the DAO proposals and grants, we’ll enable community members to do all kinds of cool things that help power the growth of Dtravel. For example, one of the things that I was constantly approached about was helping to create a supply store for hosts. This directly benefits hosts but is hard to kickstart. Well if this helps benefit our host community, this might be something we’d fund through the DAO grants. Just an example, but as you can see, by opening up to the community, we’re building a completely different experience and community than what exists today.
Because every TRVL holder gets ownership in the community, that means that anyone who contributes will benefit. This isn’t something the home sharing industry can offer today due to the inherent differences between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. We’re really leveraging the benefits of being a Web 3.0 project to differentiate what we can do.
Twitter Question 3)
Cyn: We’re still working on this and will update our whitepaper. We want to make sure that people’s interests are aligned and community members must hold TRVL in order to have a vote. This is why we’re also doing what we consider to be a “fair distribution” by giving 90M TRVL tokens away to the community. You can read more about it in our article — https://medium.com/dtravel-community/90-000-000-reasons-to-use-dtravel-1ca9bd5bc615.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: WOW! That is one heck of an airdrop! Excited to see the revised tokenomics once it comes out!!
Well, @cynb3ar that about sums up our time at the OIG AMA Series.
Any final words you would like to leave with our community?
Cyn: Yes definitely! Please make sure you do follow us as we have LOTS of exciting announcements coming over the next few weeks.
Social media links:
Telegram — https://t.me/dtravelcommunity
Telegram announcements — https://t.me/dtravelannouncements
Twitter — https://twitter.com/DtravelDAO
Medium — https://medium.com/dtravel-community
If you’re going to be travelling, make sure you book with www.dtravel.com and get rewards when you book 🤗
Thanks for having me @SaigonXIII and the OIG community. Appreciate the support 🙏.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Want to be the first to say thank you for stopping by @cynb3ar, truly enjoyed this AMA and we are very excited to see what Dtravel has cooking up in the coming months. OIG will be here to support!!
And as always OIG community thank you for coming out! We have two awesome AMAs tomorrow including the postponed CoreStarter one!
Come back tomorrow for more amazing conversations and great prizes!!
Stay blessed OIG!!! ✨
