Buying Glastonbury tickets with a Blockchain

Are txs fee’s a fair way for distributing tickets?

I sit again, for the 5th year in a row, repeatedly refreshing https://glastonbury.seetickets.com hoping and praying that one of eighteen people in our syndicate gets through and purchases another 6 tickets.

In the 5 years I have been trying to attend Glastonbury I have never managed to get through to the purchase page. Always stuck in a permanent cycle of refresh, wait, refresh.

Luckily every year we are in a larger group which try to get tickets for each other. If the gods look on you favourably and you secure a ticket, you will be heading of to one of the worlds largest music and arts festival, something which is not be missed if possible.

As I write this blog in a deflated and semi depressed state having not secured tickets for another year, with only 6 of the 18 people in our group successful. I’m thinking there must be a better way to do this, a fairer way, a way which we can use Blockchain maybe.

Let’s assets some the characteristics of what is required for purchasing tickets:

• One person, one ticket — this makes sense — in the world of Glastonbury tickets this consists of pre-registering interesting and uploading a photo and some personal details, each user is then assigned a unique reference number which can only be used once.
• The ability to pay for a ticket — a credit or debit card is required to make payment and tickets are only secured with an initial £50 deposit with the remaining balance needing to be cleared before April 1st the following year.
• A web browser to pay the refresh game with.
• A watch, tickets go on sale at 9am on a set date — this means that from about 8:55am the website its already buckling under the loaded as hundreds of thousands of people try to hit F5 and refresh the page at exactly 9am to get through to the purchase page. This continues for about 30–40 minutes until all tickets are sold out. This year selling out in about 35 mins, a record time for the festival.

These are the main components which would need to be addressed in an alternative solution utilising blockchain. All of these things though can easily be model using things such as smart contracts and through simple blockchain concepts. Lets run through how this may work with a public blockchain.

1. Create a registration page where users can create an account, upload a photo and some details — this is basically the same as every KYC process out there which I‘ve seen in the crypto space. Maybe we could offload the storage of this to IPFS and simply store the hashes in any smart contract.
2. Develop a smart contract where Glastonbury places an entry for each KYC’s a.k.a. registered users into the contract, along which the eth address they will make the purchase with. Probably issuing tickets as a custom ERC-721 derived token.
3. Program a few simple rules into the smart contract e.g . one user one ticket, max buy upto 5 extra tickets, tickets are available from X time, set a fixed price per ticket, at least for the deposit — although crypto is very volatile this can be managed to a certain extent.
4. Deploy your smart contract to mainnet for the world to see, ensure all your users are made aware and registrations commence.
5. On the day of the purchase users can then flood the network and try to buy a ticket, those who win the race included in the next block secure tickets.

Now although its very achievable to do this in reality we are simple moving the problem from “how quick can I refresh” to a “how much can I afford to pay” problem. Those who pay the most will win the race to secure tickets due to the open market and incentives that exists when mining new blocks. Also Im pretty sure that this fundamentally does not align itself with the ethos of Glastonbury from my understanding!

Some of the immediate challenges and thoughts that any solution would need to overcome:

• Scalability — if 1 million people try to simultaneously execute a transaction on Ethereum, this unfuntly would cripple the network ,forcing transaction costs to skyrocket.
• UX/UI — there is still a need for a web frontend — portraying the progress of your transaction is required, blockchains are still tricky to convey intent to the users about.
• Is it fairer — not really, at least when mimicking the current process but using blockchain and smart contracts does not make it fairer.
• Price fluctuations — these can be avoided to some extent using stable coins and price oracles but still.
• Adoption — an obvious issue if that not that people are used to interacting and using blockchains yet, things like wallets and concepts of gas are not mainstream.

One possible option is to change the way tickets are distributed and allocated. Instead of making it random in a way that nobody understanding how it works, why not play in the open. This is where you could use the blockchain to provide a more open and transparent allocation method.

Anyway, above are some of my brain farts which happened when frantically trying to buy glastonbury tickets!

Immersing yourself in Blockchain and cryptocurrencies like we do at BlockRocket doesn’t always mean that these things need to be take on beyond a brain fart and that Blockchain is a fit for all use cases. At BlockRocket we will tell you when it’s the correct or the wrong choice to make when investing in technology.

If you would like to know more please reach out to us on twitter, @BlockRocketTech, or email is at hello@blockrocket.tech. We are based in Manchester city centre and always keen on a face to face chat over a coffee.