Aventus founders talk blockchain ticketing on Sky News with Ian King
Ian: Now, if England make the World Cup final on Sunday, you might have to pay £10,000 for a seat — that’s apparently what tickets are changing for in Moscow right now. Many sporting and music tickets are being bought by bots just minutes after going on-sale, leaving fans to buy them at an inflated price on a secondary ticketing site. UK tech start-up Aventus hope to come to the aim of consumers; it’s founders, Alan Vey and Annika Monari join me now. So, what are you trying to achieve with this?
Annika: We really want to allow event organisers and rights holders to be able to control the secondary market, and to be able to set price-caps, or prevent resale altogether, or keep it at face value — so it’s more fair for the fans, so it’s more fair for the artists and performers, and so ultimately everyone benefits more from a better-regulated market.
Ian: And this is based on blockchain technology, so how does it work?
Alan: We can’t get into the complexities, but fundamentally what we’re using is some of the new properties that have been enabled with blockchain that previously weren’t available within your software toolset. Ultimately what we’re looking at is using properties around transparency, the control you can exert over the inventory: those are the core benefits that we can bring to the ticketing industry here.
Ian: But crucially, preventing tickets from being sold on a secondary website?
Alan: So what it really does is it gives the promoter the toolset to be able to set up any business logic or rules associated with their ticketing inventory they like, so for the UK obviously touting is a very important issue, we’d like to be able to see people setting hard-caps on resale, maybe taking a commission on the secondary market — so those are really the tools that are available with the blockchain smart contracts that we enable.
Ian: Why don’t people already cap prices on the secondary market?
Annika: It’s very difficult, because the way it works now is that the industry’s fairly siloed across the supply chain. So for example, if you buy a ticket in the primary, as soon as it leaves and it’s in your hands, the primary loses oversight of that ticket. And then when you put it on a resale market and someone else buys it, no longer to they have the connection between you and the person, no longer does the primary know who is actually holding the ticket. What we try to do and what blockchain technology enables us to do is create a backbone that sits across the supply chain; so the ticket is tracked the whole way through. So a) the consumer can prevent counterfeits, they know if their ticket is real or not because it sits on that backbone. And b) the original artists or performers or primary agents can now see exactly who holds the ticket, when, and who ends up holding the ticket, when.
Ian: The events organiser often claim that’s already the case; you don’t think it is?
Alan: A big part of this is also associating identity with a ticket, so many a time when you buy a ticket you’ll buy, say, three, and it’ll have your name and not those of the other two. And when you get to the venue, you know that when you’re trying to get 70,000 people into an arena it’s not an easy thing to do. Checking everybody’s identity is part of the problem. So we need advances, not only with blockchain but also with AI, face recognition, things like this that we’re seeing some of the big guys start to implement. But it’s really about getting widespread adoption across the market.
Ian: Why do you think this necessarily helps the artist? If I’m an artist, I’m being paid my share of the ticket sales anyway. If the price is bid up, then surely it makes my next concert all the more popular, I can drive prices even higher?
Annika: That’s an interesting one. Ultimately what you do see is, take someone like Adele: her true fans maybe can’t afford those higher tickets so she wants to artificially price the tickets lower so that more and more of her fans can attend and she gets that nice atmosphere within the concert, and also the people that bought the music get to see her perform. So they do care to at least regulate the market and make sure all of their fans can go, rather than only the richest ones or the ones who were lucky enough on that day.
Alan: This is where we’re touching on why this whole secondary market problem exists, and it’s because artists like Adele, Ed Sheeran, those looking for fairer experiences for their fans, will price below market equilibrium price to enable maximum number of people to show up. So of course, you’re always going to have an incentive to make up that premium to what everybody else will actually pay. Fundamentally, that’s what we’re trying to do at Aventus: give people the tool-set to control the market fully and prevent that from happening if possible.
Ian: I guess real fans create more atmosphere than the prawn-sandwich brigade at times, as well. So you’ve raised £24m for an Initial Coin Offering; what are you going to do with the proceeds?
Alan: So we’ve already started building out our team here in London, we’ve got a team of about 25 people now, mainly software developers. It’s really about building the product and making it sturdy to handle the kind of volumes that we see for major arenas, and then we’re expanding to the US and other territories as well.
Annika: Also, it’s worth saying that we don’t want to do everything. We’re not going to sit there and assume that we can take over the whole industry in all the countries. Really what we’re trying to do is build that backbone, that open standard that sits under everything, and help fund other projects that build on top; so whether it’s our product, whether it’s someone else who’s also building on the Protocol to create a fairer ticketing industry with more control, we want to fund them too. So the proceeds are to us but also to others who want to help us on this mission.
Ian: So there are lots of other potential applications for your technology and particularly for rights holders?
Alan: So obviously we can be in music or sports, but travel is another big one — so the Protocol fundamentally applies to a very wide raise of problems and that’s where we come to the industry as a software company trying to provide solutions to the industry in a B2B manner. We’re never going to be B2C selling tickets; we’re going to sell the industry the infrastructure to make it work, and we’ll deal with the technology, which is our expertise. We won’t try and say we know exactly how to solve the problems; we leave it up to them [rights holders and ticketing agencies] to set the rules that make sense for them.
