The Swiss startup Chain4Travel has announced the launch of the Camino Network mainnet, a public but permissioned blockchain designed for the global travel industry. The company says that the network is backed by major airlines like Lufthansa, Eurowings, Hahn Air, plus a host of other hotel and car rental chains. The project’s goal is to make the travel industry more efficient by using blockchain to build and deploy decentralized applications (dApps) that would improve interoperability between the various participants.
The Camino Network is built as a permissioned blockchain, which literally means that you need to obtain permission to build smart contracts on it or become a validator. This is opposed to permissionless open blockchains like Ethereum (ETH-USD), where there’s a strong ethos of allowing anyone to access them. Camino Network is aimed at enterprises, so it’s not surprising that it is permissioned, as it’s built to serve a specific use case for large companies.
Open blockchains allow anyone to use them, including a small portion of criminals — that’s not something that Lufthansa or any other participant in the network would tolerate.
Enterprise blockchains are not new, with several initiatives like IBM’s (NYSE:IBM) Hyperledger or R3 Corda being available on the market for many years, especially during the “blockchain craze” of 2017-2018, when people thought that anything put on a blockchain is instantly 100 times better. Corda and Hyperledger were examples of fully-private blockchains, which cannot be used or even analyzed by anyone outside of its restricted set of participants (which were large corporations).
Private enterprise blockchains never really fulfilled the hype, primarily because once you take out the “public” and “permissionless” aspects of a blockchain, you’re mostly just left with a very slow and clunky database. Camino Network is still public, though, which is different from many previous attempts at similar things. This means that anyone can check the activity and use the chain, which makes the system much more transparent.
Indeed, Camino Network is also aimed at the end users, with future dApps on the network enabling things like streamlined payments, reconciliation (refunds), as well as tokenized loyalty programs and tickets (which could potentially be resold). Building dApps on the network is generally open to anyone, but the team will ask for know-your-client or know-your-business checks from anyone deploying smart contracts or validating the network.
Over 80 key players in the travel sector, including airlines, tech providers, and operators, have enrolled as trusted validators for the Camino Network. Validators must stake 100,000 CAM tokens, providing them with voting privileges concerning the network’s governance.
A select group of validators is currently participating in the mainnet’s soft launch, with the goal of evaluating the network and its initial dApps in a real-world scenario. Following the completion of this test period, any remaining validators will be rapidly integrated, ensuring that the network is prepared for widespread use by June 2023.
The global travel industry is unquestionably one of the most important elements of today’s economy, accounting for more than 10% of global GDP before the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the industry is also old and often relies on outdated and proprietary technology platforms and numerous bilateral licensing agreements.
The Camino Network aims to address this by rethinking the structure from the ground up, enabling next-generation decentralized applications and services built on a global and largely open network. As a consortium validated by participants of the industry, it can become a central place to build interoperable apps.
The Camino Network has been operational in testnet since Q2 of 2022, undergoing an extensive testing process before its launch. This includes an audit of its source code, smart contracts, and infrastructure components by cybersecurity firm Hexens, which has previously audited projects like Polygon’s (MATIC-USD) zkEVM, 1inch, and TON (previously known as Telegram Open Network).
Chain4Travel, the company behind Camino Network, says that over 120 industry participants are participating and backing the project, while the company has also received over 10 million CHF in funding. Blockchain initiatives dealing with the real world have often struggled to gain traction, usually because the teams behind them were unable to make headway in the relatively closed world of traditional corporations. Often, the solutions were simply unneeded and uninteresting to either the enterprises that needed to adopt them or their customers.
Still, initiatives like loyalty points or gamification are being adopted by a number of brands through companies like Lolli. Overall, Camino Network has the ingredients to buck the trend of “enterprise” blockchain initiatives, but only time will tell if they will.
