Nite Token (Nites): A Standardized Representation of a Booking

Currently, the vacation rental industry suffers from a lack of shared agreement on the definition of the foundational aspects of the industry, such as how even to define a booking.

Each Nite Token (Nite) represents a booked night at a specific property. It gives its holder the right to spend that night in the property. Buying the Nites for particular dates, a traveler is booking a property for the nights in that date range.

Nites are a form of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) - they're unique and cannot be substituted as each Nite is specific to a specific property room night. For compliance and ease of adoption, the Nite standard extends the ERC721 NFT standard, which is the most well-known and widely used.

Importantly, by implementing the ERC721 standard's interfaces, NT contracts allow vacation rental operators to approve third parties to transfer tokens on their behalf. Therefore, vacation rental operators can authorize external platforms (such as property management systems, online travel agencies, token exchanges, marketplaces, direct booking sites, and, generally, any kind of distribution channel) to transfer tokens to travelers who make bookings through their platforms. The vacation rental operators can also revoke the authorizations to transfer tokens at any time.

Every property has its own deployed NT contract. This contract can be deployed to any EVM-compatible blockchain. It's not necessary for all contracts to be deployed to the same blockchain. However, to ensure a single source of truth, every property will have only one deployed contract.

Using this approach, whether a night is booked can be determined by checking whether the corresponding token is owned by someone other than the property manager. Furthermore, whether a night is available through a given operator depends on whether the current token owner authorized the operator to transfer the token on their behalf. All this information is public on the Nite Protocol.