Between 2017 and 2022, dozens of crypto projects promised to rebuild travel. Book a flight with Bitcoin. Own your hotel room as an NFT. Cut Booking.com out of the loop.

The companion card, The On-Chain Travel Stack, maps the names still running today. Strip it back to the projects that actually launched in this 2017-2022 wave and are still operating, and you are left with barely a quarter of the field. This is the other three quarters.

Here is what happened to the ones that didn't make it.

1. Winding Tree: the one that got closest

Raised $14.2M. Died July 2024. Seven years old.

Winding Tree was not vaporware. It ran live pilots with Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Nordic Choice Hotels and citizenM. Hahn Air issued real airline tickets over its platform. The product worked.

It still lost.

CEO Maksim Izmaylov published a post-mortem in July 2024 that is the most honest document in this entire sector. His three reasons:

1. Crypto's sole real use case turned out to be gambling. The industry evolved in a direction that had nothing to do with travel distribution.

2. The travel industry used "blockchain" as marketing language while having zero interest in actual decentralization.

3. Even at major hotel chains, there was nobody on staff who could process a crypto transaction.

Their EY partnership reached a working, revenue-generating product. Then EY's management changed and it was cancelled.

One detail worth keeping: Winding Tree capped its own ICO. They raised $14.2M from about 7,000 backers, kept $10M, and routed the excess into a smart contract that bought back and burned tokens. In 2018. Almost nobody did this.

LIF today: $64K market cap, one exchange, $0 in daily volume. Their GitHub org contains a repository named "winding-down." The @windingtree handle now belongs to a stranger who registered it in May 2025.

2. Pinktada: resold hotel nights as NFTs

Raised ~$4.25M. Went quiet July 2023.

Genuinely clever mechanic: every non-refundable hotel night became a tradeable NFT. Cannot make the trip? Resell the night instead of eating the cancellation. Sell it at a profit and the hotel took 30% of your upside.

The Wall Street Journal covered it. It required two things that never showed up together: hotels willing to trade refund revenue for guaranteed sales, and a liquid market of buyers for one specific room on one specific night.

Ran out of runway as the NFT market collapsed and "NFT" became a liability word in consumer travel.

No shutdown announcement was ever made. Today pinktada.com redirects to an Indonesian online-slots affiliate page. PitchBook and Tracxn still list it as an active five-person company.

3. Aeron: pilot logbooks on chain

Raised $5.7M against a $30M cap. Last post April 2022.

The pitch was serious: falsified flight hours and maintenance records cause crashes, so put them on a blockchain. They shipped a working logbook app in 2018.

Aviation records are among the most heavily regulated data on earth. No regulator or airline was moving them onto a public chain. Zero adoption.

So they pivoted. Into a loyalty token. Then staking. Then a trading game. Binance delisted ARN in July 2020.

Their final public post, April 2022, opens by explaining the development team lost several key developers in Ukraine. The war wrote the last sentence, not the market.

ARN peaked at $8.67 in January 2018. Last recorded price: $0.0028. The @aeronaero account has been renamed to the display name "inactive" with a bio of four dashes.

4. GOeureka: zero-commission hotels, twice

Two token sales. Second life lasted 31 days.

The 2018 pitch was reasonable: let hotels list without paying Booking.com commissions, charge travellers 5% and waive it if they pay in GOT.

The 2018 ICO did not produce a working business. The team admitted it in writing: "there haven't been many updates from us over the past 12 months." So in July 2021 they migrated to Tezos, blamed Ethereum gas fees, and ran a second sale.

You can date the death from on-chain data. Their Tezos sale contract shows first activity 14 July 2021 and last activity 14 August 2021. Thirty-one days.

goeureka.io now serves a Thai-language Fun88 casino portal. The X account is deleted.

5. Trippki: the only one with a death certificate

Company dissolved 28 March 2023.

Hotel bookings paid in crypto, loyalty rewards in TRIP, reviews gated by a "Proof of Stay" model so only real guests could write them.

The ICO ran July to September 2018 with a 3,600 ETH soft cap and a 27,500 ETH hard cap. No result was ever announced. Two months later they published a post about "redesigning tokenomics" and partnering with third-party booking tech. Read that how you like.

Their last blog post went up 20 February 2020, weeks before travel stopped worldwide. Nothing was ever published again. A crypto OTA with no capital cushion and eighteen months of zero bookings had no path back.

TRIPPKI LTD, company number 10673507, registered to a house in Dorset, dissolved March 2023. Their final article was about whether European trains are greener than planes.

6. Travacoin: instant airline compensation

Institutional cover, no survival.

This one had everything a B2B pilot is supposed to have. The concept won third prize at IATA's World Passenger Symposium in Dubai, 2016. Wipro built the blockchain payment solution. IATA planned to test it. An FTI Consulting study claimed it would cut airline compensation costs 20 to 40%.

The product let airlines pay passengers instantly for delays and cancellations in digital currency instead of vouchers.

Then 2020 happened. Airlines stopped flying, faced a solvency crisis, and were being sued for refusing cash refunds. It was the worst conceivable moment to pitch a novel crypto refund instrument.

travacoin.com now returns a bare Microsoft IIS 404 page. The X account is deleted.

7. XcelTrip: the quiet exit

Never announced anything.

A crypto-only OTA out of Kathmandu and San Jose. Book hotels and flights with BTC, ETH, USDT or its own XLAB token. Part of a wider XcelLab ecosystem with a wallet and a marketplace.

There was no shutdown post. Content stopped in December 2024. The site was still up in November 2025. Today xceltrip.com and xcelpay.io have no DNS record at all. Somebody just stopped paying for the domains.

The ERC-20 contract still shows 101,810 holders. Roughly a hundred thousand wallets are holding a token whose company's domain name does not resolve.

8. Tripio: the biggest raise, the smallest footprint

Raised ~$19.2M. Dead by 2023.

More money than Winding Tree. Backers that read like a who's who of the 2018 Chinese crypto scene: Tron, F2Pool, Node Capital, INBlockchain. A decentralized booking marketplace out of Singapore with 5 billion TRIO minted.

It produced almost nothing anyone can point to.

Developer commits stopped in December 2022. TRIO stopped trading in January 2023. Today tripio.io returns NXDOMAIN, the domain was not even renewed, and an unrelated Hawaiian car-rental company briefly squatted the name before it went dark. The one artifact that survives is the ERC-20 contract itself, frozen on-chain with 18,275 holders and a market cap of exactly zero.

The lesson Winding Tree learned the hard way, Tripio never learned at all: raising more did not buy a single real booking.

9. Bee Token: the honest obituary

Raised ~$5M. Hacked during its own ICO. Shut down ~2019.

Beenest wanted to be a decentralized Airbnb. It is remembered for the wrong reason: on the final days of its January 2018 sale, phishers spoofed the team's mailing list and walked off with roughly $1M of contributors' ETH before the token even launched.

But the hack is not why it died. The team published one of the most honest shutdown notes in the sector, and it says exactly what Winding Tree's CEO said six years later: people showed up to invest, not to travel. BEE now trades at a fraction of a cent; beetoken.com is a memorial page, beenest.com does not resolve, and the X account is suspended.

Two independent teams, six years apart, wrote the same post-mortem. That is not a coincidence, it is the whole story of this sector in one sentence.

The one that did not fail: TravelbyBit

Worth separating out, because it gets miscounted as a casualty.

TravelbyBit put Bitcoin point-of-sale terminals into roughly 30 stores across Brisbane Airport in 2018. An entire international terminal taking crypto at the till. It raised $2.5M from Binance plus a Queensland government grant.

In May 2020 it merged into Travala, also Binance-backed. The entities wound down by 2022 and travelbybit.com now redirects to travala.com.

That is an exit, not a death. It is also the only physical-world footprint anyone in this sector ever built.

Its X handle now belongs to a stranger who registered it in June 2021.

What actually killed them

Across the whole cohort, the causes are not random.

Nobody needed a token to book a hotel. Travala proved you can run a crypto OTA at scale. It did it by being a good OTA that accepts crypto, not by making the token load-bearing. Every project here that made the token the product died.

The B2B ones needed the whole industry to move at once. Winding Tree and Travacoin both built things that only work if airlines and hotels coordinate. They do not coordinate. Winding Tree got the biggest names in aviation into pilots and still could not find one person at a hotel chain who could process a crypto payment.

COVID was the filter, not the cause. Trippki and Travacoin both died in 2020, but neither had a real business before it. Travel stopping for eighteen months just made the absence of revenue impossible to hide.

Regulated industries do not want public chains. Aeron's premise was correct and its market was closed. Flight records were never moving to Ethereum.

They came to invest, not to travel. This is the one line that recurs. Winding Tree's CEO wrote it in his 2024 post-mortem. Bee Token wrote it in its shutdown note in 2019. Nobody assembled a token holder base that actually wanted to book a hotel, they assembled a token holder base that wanted the token to go up. When it didn't, there was no user left underneath.

The domains keep ending up as casinos. Three of them now serve gambling sites: Pinktada, which the Wall Street Journal wrote about, points at an Indonesian slots page; GOeureka points at a Thai casino; RoomDAO now redirects to a Vietnamese betting portal. Dead crypto-travel domains have real search traffic, and the highest bidder for that traffic is almost always an offshore casino.

Raising more did not help. Tripio raised ~$19.2M and left less behind than teams that raised a tenth of that. Emphy raised only 6% of its target and shipped about as much. The size of the round had no relationship to whether anything got built.

The handful still standing did not survive because their tech was better. They survived because they sold something people wanted to buy, a working OTA, a live L1, an eSIM that connects, and the crypto part was a payment rail rather than the pitch.

The graveyard, in one table

The nine above got the long write-up because their stories are the most instructive. But they are not the whole cohort. Here is the full set of on-chain travel projects we could verify as dead or abandoned.

Winding Tree (LIF): $14.2M, Jul 2024. Got airline pilots live, found no one who could process crypto.

Tripio (TRIO): ~$19.2M, 2023. Biggest raise here, near-zero product; domain now NXDOMAIN.

Cool Cousin (CUZ): ~$10M, ~2019. Abandoned a working 500K-user guide app to chase a token.

Aeron (ARN): $5.7M, ~2022. Regulated aviation records were never moving to a public chain.

Bee Token / Beenest (BEE): ~$5M, ~2019. Phishing hack at ICO, then no users who wanted to travel.

Pinktada: ~$4.25M, Jul 2023. NFT hotel nights needed hotels and buyers that never showed.

GOeureka (GOT): 2 sales, Aug 2021. No product after ICO one; second life lasted 31 days.

Trippki (TRIP): cap unmet, Mar 2023. No cushion, 18 months of zero bookings, then COVID.

Travacoin: IATA-backed, ~2020. Pitched a crypto refund tool the moment airlines stopped flying.

XcelTrip (XLAB): ~2024. Quietly stopped paying for its own domains; ~100K holders stranded.

RoomDAO (RDC): ~$1.18M, ~2020. Small raise, stalled roadmap; domain now a Vietnamese casino.

Emphy (EPY): ~$0.45M, ~2020. Raised 6% of target, never shipped; domain gone.

Travelflex (TRF): own chain, ~2019. Promised its own DAG chain, delivered nothing.

Triip (TIIM): ~$0.7M, pivoted. Morphed into a "green metaverse" DAO that also stalled.

Aditus (ADI): ~2019. Luxury crypto-concierge with no traction (med confidence).

Dacsee (DACS): ~$31M, zombie. Blockchain ride-hailing lost to Grab; token dead, app limps (transport-adjacent).

TravelbyBit: $2.5M, 2022. Not a death, merged into Travala, the one clean exit.

Not a token, but worth a line: CryptoCribs, a bootstrapped crypto-Airbnb, voluntarily shut down in January 2021 and left an honest memorial page, the rare graceful exit.

The tally. Of roughly 20 on-chain travel projects we could verify from the 2017-2022 wave, about six or seven still genuinely operate, Travala, Dtravel, Roam, GET Protocol, LockTrip and Camino (the last on life support after its foundation began winding down). That is about one in four, and every additional dead token we did not chase down only pushes the survival rate lower. The card's "25% still survives" is, if anything, generous to the winners.

Domains now serving gambling sites: Pinktada (Indonesian slots), GOeureka (Thai casino), RoomDAO (Vietnamese betting). X handles deleted or suspended: GOeureka, Travacoin, Bee Token. Handles re-registered by strangers: Winding Tree, TravelbyBit.

Census verified 8 August 2026 from on-chain records, company registries, Wayback captures and live DNS. Confidence is high on every project shown except where marked. Not financial advice.

A full list of Major Upcoming Events, to be updated

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