Anyone who’s used Airbnb knows that the company stands on its laurels as a leader in the 1.0 family-sharing economy, but its dominance lies in making the most of it: servers and guests share and actually create value. Guests pay too much and the host is underpaid. The result was a situation similar to that of feudalism, which treated landlords like serfs, renting out the house, maintaining hygiene, looking after guests, and doing the real work. However, the value derived from Airbnb’s peer-to-peer exchanges goes straight to shareholders who are many steps away from actually trading. It is nothing more than an injustice.

There is a very simple reason for this. Web 2.0 sharing economies like Airbnb and Uber are being forced into what is known as a mining imperative. In the early days of these platforms, they matched their users on both sides of the market and treated both of them as partners to launch network effects – much like providing grants. The peer-to-peer element of the sharing economy is at the heart of the brand’s marketing and it looks like a populist takeover of the travel industry is underway.

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Sharing economy with Web 2.0

It wasn’t long before we realized that this vision of the sharing economy was a lie. Web 2.0 companies are driven by a growth model at all costs to go public and then become the object of shareholders who benefit from that growth. To live up to this model, these companies are forced to make as much profit as possible from the users trading in their markets in order to appease shareholders and other stakeholders who are not really human.

While selling a myth of empowerment and peer-to-peer sharing, platforms like Airbnb are now confronting their users with using everything they can to maximize profits and ensure customer satisfaction. For example, Airbnb went from being well aimed to being completely skewed, creating a ripple effect across the market.

A prime example of a divergence in the family-sharing economy are the actions Airbnb took in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating impact on global travel. Airbnb has unilaterally changed its cancellation and refund policy in favor of guests in order to retain as many customers as possible while placing last-minute sterilization and cancellation policies on the hosts. This is a metric based solely on win and loss rates and prioritizes the needs of the guest rather than the host because in the end, it’s the guest who drives the revenue. However, the servers that delivered the revenue-generating assets suffered losses and a deep level of suspicion arose.

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Worse, most Web 2.0 sharing economies like Airbnb don’t work on solid foundations. Their number of employees is extremely inflated and their business models are still unproven. They had to raise countless rounds of funding to keep growing while reducing the value they offered to their user community. As incumbents tighten controls and capitalize on profits, a moment is imminent.

Decentralization is the key

Users are aware that they are being exploited – they just need a viable alternative. So how do we solve the problem of forced mining, the middlemen sucking value from value-adders into the hands of wealthy shareholders, and the lack of trust and representation we have? ? The answer is a decentralized marketplace that is run and managed by its users and acts like a machine rather than a mining cartel with unicorn dreams.

Home sharing is ideal for a decentralized market as travel is one of the largest industries in the world and anyone with a home or travel plan can join. The underlying technology and infrastructure of the blockchain is now scalable enough to meet the needs of such a market. And while the COVID-19 pandemic has caused setbacks for the travel industry, we are seeing a return of substantial demand that will only increase as trends such as remote working, digital nomadism and alternative accommodation begin to develop.

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If Airbnb is a feudal state, decentralized home sharing markets are a democratic sharing economy in which value creators hold up. You can create better alignment between guests, servers, and the markets they are trading in. And the people who actually use the platform are the decision makers who directly reflect the value creation mechanisms of the platform.

Building on the blockchain infrastructure with proven models for a peer-to-peer marketplace with powerful integrated tokens, the decentralized alternative to the travel industry is there. And it means home sharing 2.0, travel bookings for the web 3.0 and an end to the exploitation of servers and guests around the world.