Airbnb hires a large number of ChangeTip employees and enters the blockchain field in a high-profile manner

Airbnb has hired most of the staff from ChangeCoin, the company that runs the bitcoin micropayments service ChangeTip, according to four sources familiar with the matter.

Sources said Airbnb has been watching a number of bitcoin and blockchain startups to see what the technologies could do for its services.

ChangeCoin lets users send small amounts of money, or tips, on social networks like Twitter and Reddit through a service called ChangeTip, but Airbnb appears to be interested in the company only for its talent: sources say ChangeCoin is still looking for a buyer for its intellectual property.

According to CrunchBase, ChangeCoin was founded by former Yahoo engineer and Bitcoin entrepreneur Nick Sullivan and has approximately 11-50 employees.

While a slew of financial firms have invested resources and announced pilots around blockchain, consumer technology companies haven’t talked much about it. But Airbnb recently hinted at its interest in the technology, with co-founder and CTO Nathan Blecharczyk telling CityAM that blockchain could potentially allow Airbnb to share its user profiles with other companies.

According to the company (pdf), Airbnb’s user base grew to more than 17 million in the summer of 2015, and it has developed a valuable database of reviews and ratings that allow hosts and guests to judge the trustworthiness of deals. “On Airbnb, your reputation is everything, and I can see this moving in the future, so if you want to visit some homes, you need to have a certain reputation,” Blecharczyk told CityAM.

Blockchains are well suited to addressing this trust issue; they can provide a permanent record of transactions and other data, and in some cases, make that data more readable.

If Airbnb can figure out a way to make user profiles immutable and legible, they could become a form of trusted digital identity. If these identifiers could be "exported" to other platforms, as Blecharczyk puts it, they could become very valuable. An Uber driver, for example, might know if his next passenger has a bad record with Airbnb.

If Airbnb is bold, it could also start exploring more esoteric, but potentially very useful, blockchain applications, such as having a door open or close automatically when a user sends a sum of money to a landlord via the blockchain.

ChangeTip built a relatively successful product, but that alone is not enough to build a sustainable company.

ChangeCoin has raised $5 million from investors including 500 Startups, Digital Currency Group and Pantera Capital since its launch in 2014.

Original article: http://qz.com/657246/airbnb-just-acquired-a-team-of-bitcoin-and-blockchain-experts/
Author: Ian Kar Joon Ian Wong
Translation: Overnight porridge
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/airbnb-changecoin)