Using the blockchain to revolutionise ticketing
It seems like not a week goes by without reports of some new ticket scalping scandal, with ever-more artists speaking out against the practice — this week, it’s the Rolling Stones in the spotlight after touts were discovered charging fans almost £1000 a ticket.
Blockchain is being touted (…excuse the pun) as a potential solution to the problem, giving rights holders and event organisers a means to take control of the entire ticketing supply chain.
By storing tickets on the blockchain, each ticket can be assigned a unique and secure identifier: one which can be tracked transparently each time a transaction is made — e.g. from event organiser to primary seller to fan, or from primary seller to secondary seller to fan — proving both the ticket’s provenance (and thus its legitimacy), its current owner, and its transaction history.
This means that event organisers and rights-holders can set pricing limits when uploading tickets onto the blockchain, giving them the ability to select minimum and maximum price caps for individual tickets, or to receive a set percentage of secondary revenues.
There are even advantages for secondary agents, who stand to benefit from the increased consumer confidence brought from stamping out unethical behaviour hosted by their platforms.
For organisers, this means control and transparency; for consumers, it means no more touting, checks on spiralling ticket prices, and no more fraudulent tickets (it is estimated that Britons squandered over £5 million on counterfeit tickets in 2015 alone).
The Aventus Protocol is an open-source protocol on the Ethereum blockchain, built for exactly this purpose. It utilises ‘smart contracts’ to ensure that users have a single source of truth for verification and tracking of tickets and their associated transactions.
There’s a lot of chatter at the moment around crypto-based technologies, but more long-term thinkers are turning their thoughts to how the blockchain can be used to bring real, tangible benefits to consumers, businesses, and society as a whole. At Artos, we are committed to bridging the gap between the Aventus Protocol and the ticketing world, partnering with event organisers and rights-holders to develop real-world applications that will create real change.
