Home-rental marketplace Airbnb has hired specialists from bitcoin micropayments processor ChangeCoin to develop blockchain services for a worldwide private housing platform.

The group from ChangeCoin hired by Airbnb consists of seven IT engineers, according to Business Insider citing a source familiar with the terms of the deal. 

Airbnb has negotiated with several blockchain startups, finally choosing ChangeCoin as it has already manifested itself as a successful project owning its own mobile application ChangeTip. 

ChangeCoin team consists of 11 to 50 people and is managed by its founder, a former Yahoo engineer and bitcoin entrepreneur Nick Sullivan.

There is no information on what kind of applications the ChangeCoin IT group is to develop exactly. Earlier Airbnb was reported to be studying possible ways to implement the blockchain technology in order to optimize their business. 

Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk said in an interview to City AM that the distributed ledger technology could help increase confidence and reduce reputational risks, enabling lessors to check whether a potential tenant is a diligent consumer.

“Within the context of Airbnb, your reputation is everything, and I can see it being even more so in the future, whereby you might need a certain reputation in order to have access to certain types of homes,” he said. 

Furthermore, Blecharczyk suggested using blockchain for establishing data bases of platform customers which other decentralised networks could be granted access to. This could enable such services as Uber to verify clients who had never used Uber before.

“The question is whether there’s a way to export that and allow access elsewhere to help other sharing economy models really flourish. We’re looking for all different kinds of signals to tell us whether someone is reputable, and I could certainly see some of these more novel types of signals being plugged into our engine,” he said.

Payment services are another potential area of blockchain implementation for Airbnb. According to the company’s blog, Airbnb has been investigating blockchain since as early as 2014 at least, discussing the opportunities with its counterparts, including the Engineering Director of Coinbase Adrian McNeil.

Elena Platonova