coindesk.com
TravelX, a marketplace for tokenized travel products, went live on Wednesday with the offering of inventory of the low-cost Argentine airline Flybondi.
The platform currently offers 2.5 million tickets, which are tokenized when purchased and converted into NFTs called NFTickets, TravelX Chief Blockchain Officer Facundo Martin Diaz told CoinDesk.
After acquiring an NFTicket, a customer can auction, sell, transfer, gift or exchange them through a peer-to-peer system on TravelX, Diaz said.
To purchase tickets on the platform, users can fund the TravelX wallet — which also serves to manage the NFTickets — or pay via BinancePay. Diaz added that the company is in talks to integrate other exchanges.
TravelX is built on the Algorand blockchain and made its infrastructure open so that other companies — such as exchanges or marketplaces — can use TravelX's APIs to create their own marketplaces.
Within six to 12 months, the platform hopes to incorporate the inventory of more than 60 airlines, with a special focus on Latin American and European operators. In 2023, Diaz said the company will focus more on the U.S. and Middle East.
In November, the company closed a $11 million seed round led by Borderless Capital, said Diaz, who added that it plans to raise a Series A funding round early 2023. The company has 85 employees.
TravelX was founded by Diaz and Juan Pablo Lafosse, who previously founded Almundo.com, a tourism marketplace sold to CVC Corporation for $75 million in 2019.
As of now, the platform allows transactions using the USDC stablecoin and has no plans to incorporate other stablecoins, although it could eventually integrate coins developed by airlines, Diaz added.
TravelX charges no fee when a user purchases a ticket on the platform, but it does receive 2% when a transaction is made on the platform's peer-to-peer secondary market, while airlines keep another 2%, Diaz said.