The state of Blockchain & Web3 in Aviation

April 15, 2026· 17 min read

PS

Paul Simroth

Web3 has made big promises. In this article I want to give my perspective on the possibilities this tech has for the aviation sector and the impact it might have.

• Applications & Use Cases

Introduction

A couple of years ago I wrote a fairly optimistic piece on this blog about blockchain in aviation. Rereading it now is a slightly uncomfortable experience. Not because the underlying ideas were wrong, but because the framing was the standard conference-deck framing of that era: decentralization is coming, smart contracts will disintermediate everything, NFTs will transform loyalty, zero-knowledge proofs will solve privacy. All potentially true. Almost none of it shipped the way the decks claimed it would.

This is the follow-up. Same topic, same industry, but with the benefit of watching a full hype cycle play out, several well-funded projects quietly shut down, and a much clearer picture of which use cases actually survive contact with an airline's operations department. I'm still a Solidity developer and I still think public blockchains are interesting infrastructure. I'm also a lot less patient with Web3 marketing copy than I used to be.

The scoreboard since 2023

The easiest way to calibrate expectations is to look at what actually happened to the projects everyone was pointing at.

Winding Tree shut down. This is the big one, and it deserves to be the anchor of any honest retrospective. Winding Tree spent seven years building a public-Ethereum-based decentralized marketplace for travel distribution, the thesis being that Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport's oligopoly on GDS was ripe for disruption. They signed for example headline partnerships with Air France-KLM and Etihad[1][2]. In 2024, founder Maksim Izmaylov posted a long wind-down letter and the company released its code to the public [3]. Most of the airline "partnerships" had amounted to API access rather than actual on-chain bookings, and almost none of the suppliers were willing to touch crypto as a settlement layer [1]. Simard, the corporate-travel layer built on top of Winding Tree, ceased operations two months earlier [3]. A case study by Horst Treiblmaier went through the remains and identified the usual suspects: immature tech stack, misaligned market fit, resistance from incumbents, and a chicken-and-egg adoption problem where the value depended on a critical mass that never formed [4].

ANA GranWhale shut down. ANA NEO's virtual travel platform and NFT marketplace, pitched in 2021 with a target of ¥300 billion in revenue by FY2025 — was terminated on February 28, 2025 [5]. The post-mortem numbers are instructive: around 600,000 downloads, roughly 10,000 daily active users, persistent losses, and no realistic path to profitability [6]. ANA issued full refunds for primary-market NFT purchases and gave holders a window to export their tokens to MetaMask [7]. This was the first airline-group-owned NFT marketplace in the world [8]. It lasted a bit over a year in its full Japan release.

IATA Coin never materialized. The 2018 IATA blockchain white paper floated a supranational settlement coin for the IATA Clearing House [9]. Seven years later there is no IATA Coin. What IATA did ship, ONE Record for cargo, is explicitly not a blockchain. It's a linked-data / RDF-based API standard [10]. That's a quiet but important signal: when the industry's own standards body got serious about digitizing air cargo data exchange, they chose semantic web technology over distributed ledgers.

Against that, a few projects actually made it to something resembling production:

Uptrip (Lufthansa Group / Miles & More) graduated. Originally an experiment out of Lufthansa Innovation Hub in cooperation with Miles & More, project ownership formally transferred to Miles & More in 2025 — which in corporate-innovation terms is the closest thing to a promotion a project like this can get [11]. It runs on Polygon PoS, passengers scan boarding passes to collect NFT trading cards across more than 400 designs, and completed collections redeem for actual Miles & More rewards (lounge vouchers, Wi-Fi, Frequent Traveller status, award miles) [12]. There's even a monetization loop via the €9.99 Joker Card that fills gaps in collections [13]. NFT custody is optional — users who don't want a wallet can still collect and redeem, which is the bit most Web3-native designs got wrong [13]. I actually still use it myself and think its kinda fun though the traditional web3 aspects I would like are not really out in the open.

TravelX / Flybondi crossed 112.5 million transactions on Algorand in 2024 according to TravelX's own numbers, with Air Europa and Viva Aerobus now on the platform alongside Flybondi [14]. Every Flybondi ticket since March 2023 is issued as an NFTicket on Algorand [15]. Passengers can change names, transfer or resell tickets up to 72 hours before departure, with TravelX taking a 2% fee on secondary transactions and the airline keeping another 2% [16]. Notice what's conspicuously absent from the user-facing product: the words "blockchain," "NFT," "Algorand," or "MetaMask." TravelX deliberately rebranded the whole thing as "Ticket 3.0" to avoid scaring off passengers [17]. This is the single most honest design decision in airline Web3 so far.

airBaltic Planies completed its 10,000-NFT mint in 2024 and is still running [18]. It's the most committed NFT-native loyalty program of any airline, and CEO Martin Gauss is personally the most enthusiastic blockchain CEO in the industry [19]. That said, the program has always struggled to answer the "what problem does this actually solve" question with anything beyond "tokenization is the future" [20].

Etihad EY-ZERO1 / Horizon Club still exists and still lets holders stake NFTs for Etihad Guest miles, but has gone quiet since the 2023 Mission: Impossible livery drop [21]. It reads more like a marketing partnership with Arcube than a core loyalty strategy.

What the failures actually tell us

The temptation with a list like this is to say "crypto winter killed these projects." That's the lazy read. The more useful read is that each of these failures hit a specific, predictable wall, and most of those walls were visible from the start if anyone was willing to squint past the pitch deck.

Disintermediation was the core promise, and it didn't land. Winding Tree's failure is the clearest data point here. The value proposition, "bypass the GDS oligopoly, save everyone money, settle in crypto", sounds structurally correct. Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport genuinely do extract substantial rents from the distribution layer [22], and airlines genuinely are unhappy about it. But disintermediation requires either regulatory pressure, a dominant new entrant, or coordinated action by suppliers. Blockchain doesn't provide any of those. It provides a ledger. The incumbents responded to Winding Tree by ignoring it until it ran out of runway, and the airlines that did sign up mostly did so as hedged bets at the innovation-lab level rather than as commitments from the commercial side. The Springer case study is blunt about this pattern, and it matches what Izmaylov himself wrote in his wind-down letter [4][3].

"On-chain" without user-visible chain is just a database with extra steps. This is the most interesting tension in the entire space and I don't think we talk about it enough. The Flybondi / Ticket 3.0 model works — genuinely, measurably, 112 million transactions' worth of works — specifically because the end user never sees Algorand. No wallet, no seed phrase, no gas, no chain [17]. The airline holds custody of the NFT on the user's behalf via a TravelX-managed account. Great UX outcome. But at that point the honest question is: what does the blockchain give you over a well-designed PostgreSQL schema with a public read API? You get auditability and transferability semantics that are harder to replicate in a traditional stack, and you get a clean substrate for third-party secondary markets. Both real. Neither revolutionary. And certainly not worth the "Web3 is transforming travel" framing that accompanied every launch press release in 2022-2023. The uncomfortable truth is that for most airline use cases, a permissioned ledger or even a conventional API-plus-event-log architecture would deliver 90% of the value at 10% of the integration friction. This is why IATA ONE Record is not a blockchain [10].

NFT loyalty is gamification with extra legal risk. Uptrip works because it's fundamentally a collectible-card game bolted onto Miles & More, and the NFT layer is optional [13]. airBaltic Planies works inconsistently because it inherits all the legal ambiguity of selling something that looks like a perpetual-yield financial instrument to retail users [20]. The Etihad Mission: Impossible livery NFTs were a marketing campaign [21]. ANA's marketplace tried to build a standalone economy and collapsed under the weight of its own DAU problem [6]. The pattern is clear: when the NFT is a skin on top of an existing loyalty mechanism, it can survive. When the NFT is the loyalty mechanism, it struggles to find anyone willing to hold it long-term for reasons other than speculation.

Baggage tracking on blockchain remains vaporware in production. The IBM / IATA / HKIA / Heathrow / Cathay Pacific blockchain baggage pilot from 2020 was a genuinely interesting piece of research [23]. It is also, five years later, still a pilot. IATA Resolution 753 mandates baggage tracking, and airlines comply with it using fairly conventional RFID, IoT and event-streaming architectures [24]. None of them are on a blockchain, and a 2023 aviation DLT overview from the Center for Cryptoeconomics notes specifically that no verifiable DLT-based baggage track-and-trace implementation could be found in production anywhere [25]. The use case is theoretically elegant. The operational reality is that airlines already have integration pain with their existing baggage systems and nobody wants to add a distributed consensus layer to that stack.

Where Web3 did something genuinely new

I don't want this to read as unqualified doom. A few things actually advanced.

Zero-knowledge proofs went from research to production. In 2023, "use ZK to prove properties without revealing data" was a talking point. In 2026, zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs are running in production on multiple Ethereum L2s, and the proving costs have dropped by orders of magnitude. This matters for aviation specifically because the single biggest real problem in identity-based travel right now is data minimization. IATA has been explicit about this: the ICAO Digital Travel Credential bundles all passport data into one indivisible file, and sharing that whole file with an airline, which only needs name, DOB and sometimes nationality, would likely violate GDPR [26]. IATA's One ID framework explicitly calls for decentralized digital identity, verifiable credentials, and selective disclosure as the core primitives [27]. Those are all directly descended from the Web3 identity stack (W3C Verifiable Credentials, DIDs, and selective-disclosure signature schemes). Neither IATA nor ICAO will call this "blockchain," because the political branding is toxic and most of these systems don't actually need a public ledger to function. But the underlying cryptographic primitives, the useful part, came from the same research lineage as Ethereum.

This is the real legacy of the Web3 push in aviation: not the NFTs, not the tickets-on-chain, not the IATA Coin. It's that verifiable-credentials-and-selective-disclosure went from fringe to mainstream inside standards bodies. IATA demonstrated a full end-to-end digital travel PoC between Hong Kong and Tokyo in October 2024 using Cathay Pacific, HKIA, Narita, and a stack of DID/VC vendors including Northern Block, SICPA, Facephi, NEC, Branchspace and Neoke [28]. In March 2025, aviation security leaders at Sydney Leaders Week formally called for the adoption of Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers as the foundation for cross-border identity in aviation [29].

Secondary ticket markets for airlines are actually interesting. TravelX's 112M transactions is not nothing [14], and the underlying insight, that airlines leave revenue on the table by treating tickets as non-transferable when they could instead take a cut of a legitimate secondary market, is sound [16]. This doesn't strictly require blockchain either, but blockchain provides a credible commitment that the rules of the secondary market won't be changed retroactively by the airline, and that has non-zero value.

The integration of loyalty programs with external economies is an idea that still has legs, even if most current attempts are clumsy. There's a real thesis that loyalty points should be more liquid and more interoperable than they currently are. Whether that ends up running on a public chain, a permissioned ledger, or just a really well-designed API standard is an open question, and honestly at this point I'd bet on door number three.

What I'd tell my 2023 self about implementation

The original article had a section on project lifecycle and implementation considerations. It was accurate in the abstract and useless in practice. Here's the sharper version.

First, the "should we use blockchain" question has to be answered before the "which blockchain" question, and in at least 80% of aviation use cases the honest answer to the first question is "no." The test I now use: if you removed the distributed ledger and replaced it with a signed append-only log maintained by a trusted neutral party (IATA, a regulator, a consortium), would the system still work? For baggage tracking, cargo provenance, MRO records, and most loyalty programs, the answer is yes and those use cases will ship faster and cheaper on conventional infrastructure. The cases where the answer is genuinely no tend to involve either cross-border settlement in jurisdictions without mutual legal frameworks or user-controlled identity credentials where the whole point is that no single party should be the authority.

Second, permissioned ledgers (Hyperledger Fabric, Besu, Corda) keep winning the enterprise pilots, and public chains keep winning the marketing. This gap is narrowing as L2s mature, but if you're planning an aviation blockchain project in 2026 and your stakeholders include regulators, a permissioned or hybrid architecture should be the default. Going public-chain-native is a conscious bet that decentralization is itself a product feature your users will pay for, and that's a much harder bet than it sounded in 2022.

Third, regulatory compliance isn't a footnote, it's the project. GDPR, the EU AI Act, PNR data handling rules, and the patchwork of national data-localization laws will shape any serious aviation identity or loyalty project more than any technical decision. The immutability property of public blockchains, the one every marketing deck loves, is in direct tension with GDPR's right to erasure. There are well-known mitigations (hashing personal data off-chain, using revocable credentials, etc.) but they add complexity and the mitigations themselves often become the most interesting part of the architecture. Plan for that up front.

Fourth, don't confuse a partnership announcement with adoption. Winding Tree's list of airline partners was genuinely impressive on paper [2]. In practice, most of those partnerships meant "we gave them our API credentials and agreed to be named in the press release" [1]. Before committing to a project, or believing one, ask how many transactions are actually flowing through the system in production, and who is paying for them. The TravelX 112.5M number is credible because Flybondi has been issuing every ticket through it since March 2023 [14][15]. The Etihad EY-ZERO1 collection is less credible as evidence of adoption because its volume is a rounding error [21].

So where does this leave us

Web3 broke a lot of promises in aviation over the last few years, and I don't think there's any value in pretending otherwise. Winding Tree is the most public example, ANA NEO is the most expensive, and IATA Coin is the most quietly forgotten. The "blockchain will transform air travel" narrative that was everywhere in 2022 was mostly wrong in the specifics and right only in a very diluted sense about underlying cryptographic primitives eventually mattering.

What survived is narrower, less glamorous, and in some ways more interesting than the original pitch. Ticket tokenization works when the blockchain is invisible. NFT loyalty works when it's a gamification layer on top of a real program. Verifiable credentials and selective disclosure are going to reshape identity at the border, and they owe a real intellectual debt to the Web3 research community even though the production systems won't use public chains. Everything else, the IATA coins, the distribution disruptors, the metaverse travel platforms, the on-chain baggage tracking, is either dead, stalled, or quietly running as a research project nobody has the budget to kill.

If you're building in this space in 2026, the opportunity is genuinely there, but it looks different from what the decks promised. It's in the boring intersection of verifiable credentials, selective disclosure, API standards, and airline operations. It's in finding the specific cases where a distributed ledger provides a credible commitment that a centralized system cannot, and not trying to force-fit the technology into cases where a Postgres database would do. It's in treating Web3 as a toolkit, not an ideology.

That's the part I'd want the 2023 version of this article to have said clearly. It didn't, and I don't think most of us in this space said it clearly either. Consider this the correction.

Citations

[1] Seth Miller, "Winding Tree winds down, bailing on Blockchain for airlines", PaxEx.Aero, August 2024, https://paxex.aero/winding-tree-blockchain-airlines-travel/

[2] Ledger Insights, "Etihad Airways partners with blockchain platform Winding Tree", Ledger Insights, August 2019, https://www.ledgerinsights.com/etihad-airways-blockchain-winding-tree/

[3] Linda Fox, "Winding Tree winds up blockchain travel distribution effort", PhocusWire, August 6, 2024, https://www.phocuswire.com/winding-tree-ceases-operations

[4] Horst Treiblmaier, "Lessons learned from an abandoned tourism and travel blockchain project: the case of Winding Tree", Information Technology & Tourism (Springer Nature), 2025, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40558-025-00326-2

[5] ANA Holdings, "End of 'ANA GranWhale' Service", ANA Group Corporate Press Release, January 16, 2025, https://www.anahd.co.jp/group/en/pr/202501/20250116.html

[6] TRAICY Global, "ANA NEO to Discontinue 'ANA GranWhale' Services Due to Business Continuity Challenges", TRAICY, January 16, 2025, https://en.traicy.com/posts/2025011618456/

[7] ANA Holdings, "End of 'ANA GranWhale' Service (PDF)", ANA Group, January 16, 2025, https://www.anahd.co.jp/group/en/pr/pdf/20250116.pdf

[8] Ledger Insights, "Japan's largest airline ANA launches NFT marketplace", Ledger Insights, June 2023, https://www.ledgerinsights.com/ana-airline-nft-marketplace/

[9] Ledger Insights, "IATA releases blockchain whitepaper for airlines", Ledger Insights, November 2018, https://www.ledgerinsights.com/iata-blockchain-airlines/

[10] IATA, "Getting Started with ONE Record – ONE Record Specification", IATA Cargo, 2024, https://iata-cargo.github.io/ONE-Record/2024-12/General/Getting-Started-with-ONE-Record/

[11] Lufthansa Innovation Hub, "Uptrip", LH Innovation Hub, September 2025, https://lh-innovationhub.de/en/projekt/uptrip/

[12] Jamie Crawley / Globetrender, "Lufthansa rewards loyalty with NFT trading cards", Globetrender, November 7, 2024, https://globetrender.com/2024/11/07/lufthansa-rewards-loyalty-nft-trading-cards/

[13] Unusual Travel Blog, "Uptrip Explained: How to turn your Lufthansa Group flights into rewards", Unusual Travel Blog, August 24, 2025, https://unusualtravelblog.com/uptrip-explained-how-to-turn-your-lufthansa-group-flights-into-rewards/

[14] Bitrue Research, "TravelX Records Over 100 Million Transactions on Algorand in 2024", Bitrue Blog, May 13, 2025, https://www.bitrue.com/blog/travelx-100m-transactions-algorand-2024

[15] Algorand Foundation, "Tokenizing Airline Seats – The Biggest NFT Utility Case Yet?", Algorand Foundation News, July 2024, https://algorand.co/blog/tokenizing-airline-seats-the-biggest-nft-utility-case-yet

[16] NEST, "Argentinian Carrier Flybondi Leads the Way with NFT Tickets", Medium, May 8, 2023, https://nes-tech.medium.com/argentinian-carrier-flybondi-leads-the-way-with-nft-tickets-92da146db296

[17] Blockworks, "NFT Airline Tickets Are Beginning to Take Off", Blockworks, April 5, 2023, https://blockworks.co/news/nft-airline-tickets-revolutionize-travel

[18] Travel And Tour World, "airBaltic Announces Successful Minting of Planies NFTs, Enhancing Its Loyalty Program", Travel And Tour World, October 4, 2024, https://www.travelandtourworld.com/news/article/airbaltic-announces-successful-minting-of-planies-nfts-enhancing-its-loyalty-program/

[19] Seth Miller, "A blockchain loyalty revolution, spearheaded by airBaltic", PaxEx.Aero, September 27, 2022, https://paxex.aero/airbaltic-planies-nft-blockchain-tokenized-loyalty/

[20] Seth Miller, "airBaltic adds elite status option to Planies NFTs", PaxEx.Aero, March 2023, https://paxex.aero/airbaltic-planies-loyalty-elite-status/

[21] Mayowa Adebajo, "Etihad Airways Offers New Product to EY-ZERO1 NFT Holders, Plans to Launch Web 3.0 Loyalty Program", Coinspeaker, August 1, 2023 (updated July 2024), https://www.coinspeaker.com/etihad-airways-ey-zero1-nft/

[22] Ledger Insights, "Hahn Air issues blockchain tickets over Winding Tree platform", Ledger Insights, November 19, 2019, https://www.ledgerinsights.com/blockchain-airline-tickets-hahn-air-winding-tree/

[23] Chris Au Young, "Is blockchain the solution to enhancing baggage tracking?", International Airport Review, November 3, 2020, https://www.internationalairportreview.com/article/140360/blockchain-solution-baggage-tracking/

[24] IATA, "Baggage Tracking IATA Resolution 753/A4A Resolution 30.53 Implementation Guide", IATA, https://www.iata.org/contentassets/5316edd3aafb4866876e37883211cfc4/baggage_tracking_implementation_guide.pdf

[25] Center for Cryptoeconomics, "Blockchain and AI in the Aviation Industry", Medium, December 21, 2023, https://medium.com/@cryptecon/blockchain-and-ai-in-the-aviation-industry-6308e56e9a0d

[26] IATA, "What's Holding Back Digital Travel?", IATA Pressroom Opinions, 2025, https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/opinions/whats-holding-back-digital-travel/

[27] IATA, "One ID", IATA Programs, https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/one-id/

[28] Passenger Terminal Today, "EXCLUSIVE FEATURE: How digital identity credentials are creating a new era of air travel", Passenger Terminal Today, May 7, 2025, https://www.passengerterminaltoday.com/features/exclusive-feature-how-digital-identity-credentials-are-creating-a-new-era-of-air-travel.html

[29] IATA, "Aviation Security Leaders Call for Digital Identity", IATA Press Release, March 19, 2025, https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2025-releases/2025-03-19-01/