Airbnb Considers Blockchain Technology For its Business

Airbnb, a vacation rental online marketplace company in California, has shown a keen interest in adopting trending technologies such as cryptocurrencies, tokenization, and other blockchain applications, according to the prospectus filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.  

For the future, the company’s official filing states that they are considering technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, distributed ledger, and cloud technologies.   

In the past, the company has said that they have no plans to consider any cryptocurrency as a mode of payment.  

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The SEC filing says “Future success will … depend on our ability to adapt to emerging technologies such as tokenization, cryptocurrencies, and new authentication technologies.”   

“As a result, we intend to continue to spend significant resources maintaining, developing, and enhancing our technologies and platform. However, these efforts may be more costly than expected and may not be successful.”  

The company has specifically mentioned in the filing that their platform was hit hard by the pandemic and they reported a sharp drop in revenue.   

This year, the company still managed to sell $17.9 billion worth of gross bookings, it is still a 39% drop compared to the same time last year.  

In a statement, the company said “In early 2020, as COVID-19 disrupted travel across the world, Airbnb’s business declined significantly, but within two months, our business model started to rebound even with limited international travel, demonstrating its resilience.”  

Besides, in the last few years, many international companies have started accepting cryptocurrencies as the pandemic has escalated its adoption.   

Some earlier reports say that the Finance magnates about PayPal also has its own plan for cryptocurrencies.   

In recent years, though the company has been critical of crypto, their recent filing shows that the platform may have had a change of heart.   

Besides, in the past few years, some decentralized projects have targeted Airbnb but didn’t succeed. If the company announces that they are accepting cryptocurrencies, the news will create a buzz in the crypto market.