May 22 Update — No Frontier Left Unturned
We are back with another blog, back in our old Medium environment — which we’ll be using for community-focussed content moving forward.
Industry insights and content centered around specific products and services will remain on the Stories hub of the GET Protocol site.
A world premier: The first DeFi funded event!
It’s been floating in the air for months, even years, but we are proud to say that the event financing module has seen its first action: Integrating partner XTIXS has used the Event Financing feature to obtain funding for their Lewis Capaldi show in Reykjavik.
This marks the first time that GET Protocol’s bespoke combination of DeFi and NFT ticketing collateral has been used to make an event happen — truly a milestone of epic proportions.
What it means is that the event is backed up by a bespoke application of blockchain technologies including DeFi, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and GET Protocol’s utility token $GET. Future ticket inventory serves as collateral for a loan, with conditions programmed into a smart contract.
Considering this being the first time Event Financing was used in the wild, it was done under ‘controlled’ circumstances — in collaboration with a group of whitelisted Liquidity Providers from within the GET Protocol network. Validating our extensive work on the smart contracts and funding flows in a real, large scale environment provides us with the insights needed to flesh out and scale up the service to roll it out to all integrating partners of GET Protocol.
Former StubHub senior employee Antonio Valero, who is now the chief revenue officer from XTIXS, said: “The model under this partnership could mean a game-changer for many content creators and fans. We are extremely happy to be collaborating with GET Protocol in the creation of next-generation ticketing solutions and an alternative, independent and fair financing model for live entertainment.”
Levelling the playing field
For those who might be dropping in thinking, ‘DeFi, wtf?’, a quick refresher: Our DeFi tooling allows creators to issue unsold tickets for their future event, batched as NFTs, as collateral to Liquidity Providers, in return for a loan. This way they can fund their own events without needing outside funding.
A top-level flow from the creators’ perspective:
The Event Financing feature is designed with the purpose of democratising the process of paying for organisational costs for setting up events. Currently, oftentimes the privilege to sell tickets is forced upon organizers (content creators) through vertical integration of the value chain. If that isn’t the case the decision is made based upon who can put money on the table, forcing creators to settle for commitments and circumstances they would otherwise never have chosen.
Maarten Bloemers, CEO of GET Protocol:
‘By tokenizing future revenue of events we are truly bringing web 3.0 to the industry and removing the most important barrier for democratization. Creators are no longer dependent on a boardroom decision if their careers will take off, now they can put money where their mouths are, quite literally. This is truly a milestone that I am more than proud of. We look forward to crystalizing the Event Financing approach and rolling it out to all Ticketing Partners in the GET Protocol ecosystem.’
Don’t forget to vote!
By the way — GET Protocol’s Event Financing has been nominated for an award at the NFT.NYC conference!
The voting window already closes tomorrow, June 1st, so if you would like to support, please cast your vote for GET under the category ‘Best Collaboration between DeFi and NFTs’, here:
(Only takes a minute, you don’t need to vote on any other categories.)
Heroes Den Bosch — A Championship Winning Collectible Journey
During the month of April we saw GUTS Tickets partner with Dutch basketball team Heroes Den Bosch to bring NFT Ticketing to every home game at the Maaspoort arena. This exciting partnership sparked the beginning of our ‘Evolving Collectibles’ feature in which claimed NFT Tickets become a post-event collectible that adapts to the outcome of the game, showing a highlight play, score card and win/loss tinting.
Every fan loves the feeling of being enveloped in the atmosphere of a game, there’s no better example of this than the age old tradition of bringing a part of that feeling home through collecting ticket stubs to favourite events.
In the digital era, we believe Evolving Collectibles carries forward this tradition in a way that adds elements of dynamic interactions and community culture into the mix. Being closer to the journey of favourite creators and sports team is captured through every evolving collectible.
In fact, nothing highlights this more than the case of Heroes Den Bosch, as not only is each collectible a post-match memory but also a championship winning memento.
Yep you read that right, this month Heroes went on to become the ‘Landskampioen’ (National Champion) of the Dutch Basketball league, the first time in over five years, adding to what is now 16 wins, the highest of any club.
With this championship win, it’s time for Evolving Collectibles to shine once again, as each previously issued NFT evolves once more to commemorate this momentous occasion for Heroes and their fans.
Each NFT will be gilded with a cup and border and previous ticket holders will also be eligible to grab another commemorative NFT in the coming weeks.
We’re ecstatic that our first Evolving Collectible usecase has been able to play a part in this incredible journey for Heroes and ignite intrigue into the endless possibilities for artists and event organisers to build upon post-event storytelling through collectibles for attendees
We’re looking forward to showcasing future examples of Evolving Collectibles and the many stories that they tell along the way.
Further Context on Smart Contracts Per Event
As some may be aware, over the next few months GET Protocol will be implementing smart contract upgrades that promise to change the way artists and event organisers connect with fans and build their digital presence through Web3 platforms.
Currently our ticket minting process is handled under a single smart contract, called the NFT Ticket Factory which handles all ticket issuance through GET Protocol. You can view this contract on Polygon here.
This means that all NFT Tickets processed through GET Protocol are minted under the same contract, no matter if they are tickets for different events. As we’ve always prioritised a seamless user experience for ticket buyers, this hasn’t been an issue for GET Protocol adoption. In fact, the education and prominence of native NFT usage in the mainstream events industry still remains low even though it is certainly picking up serious steam.
Our ethos is to incentive the exploration of NFT benefits whilst ensuring a base level of advantage for all attendees through increased transparency in the ticketing process, in our eyes this is the key to mass adoption.
That being said, as pioneers in this space, we are always looking to the future and making educated guesses as to where the technology can be applied next. In our eyes there’s a clear shifting tide towards permissionless platforms for digital brand building and we believe artists and event organisers can seriously benefit from building a presence that they are in control over. With serious ground work already laid for claiming NFTs and bringing the benefits to artists, EOs and their fans, it is now time for us to ramp up incentivisation of post-event NFT benefits and walk the talk of being the most accessible in-road into Web3 for the global events industry.
Along with our Evolving Collectible, the smart contract upgrades that loom on the horizon are game changing for post-event utility as each and every event will have its own smart contract. This means that all tickets for a single event are minted under a specific smart contract and therefore artists, event organisers, sponsors and any other party can use the smart contract address for their event, to plug their NFT tickets into Web3 platforms.
How does this work?
As mentioned above, every smart contract has a unique ‘username’ that’s referred to as the smart contract address, an 18 digit combination of letters and numbers that is entirely unique to the contract.
When navigating to a Web3 platform, there is typically a feature to ‘Token Gate’ access to the product or page. Using an event’s smart contract, an Artist, Event Organiser or other party simply needs to copy the contract address and paste it into the platform:
When a user navigates to the page in question, they are greeted by an access prompt to sign a message with their crypto wallet that holds the valid NFT, in our case an NFT Ticket that will soon be specific to an event in question:
All of a sudden any party in the event chain has the ability to control their digital presence through the combination of NFT Tickets as ‘access passes or community membership passes’ and the Web3 platforms that exist. Any number of Web3 platforms can be utilised, if one isn’t needed anymore then it can simply be deconfigured by the artist/EO.
This is a major shift from the standard ‘silo’ of social media that we are typically used to in Web2, this is why the shift to Web3 usage will not be an immediate overnight hit, but a slow and growing snowball that continues to build itself as time goes on, propelled by the accessibility of an NFT Ticket.
In the interests of helping to shine a light on what’s possible in Web3 through NFT Tickets, we’ll be launching over the coming weeks a new monthly showcase blog that shines a light on the Web3 platforms that interest us the most, platforms that can add serious value to the post-event connection and make for ideal pilot platforms when we launch the smart contracts per event.
Stay tuned for that!
The Bankless DAO Vote Recap
It was a slow burn this month for the DAO, but things really picked up with the first official GET Protocol DAO vote, hosted on Snapshot and executed in a record 24 hours time!
An opportunity to sponsor the famed Bankless media group opened and we just couldn’t pass up the chance…but the cost of the sponsorship was such that we felt it would be wrong to allocate funding without first communicating with our community. We figured what better time to begin the launch of the DAO than with a democratic, distributed process of voting? We were stunned in the best of ways by the turnout and the power our community exhibited to have deep, thoughtful discussions on the community Discord server and after much deliberation, the proposal passed (and can be reviewed here:
https://snapshot.org/#/getprotocolsnapshot.eth/proposal/0x097eb34dec81595c100b47d0c9520b33d3322e1080d109fdfd7fd011fa653293). Though not representative of our final DAO structure, this vote marked the beginning of a new era for GET Protocol: An era defined by the voice of the community.
We are still in the process of working out the fine details with Bankless regarding the sponsorship opportunity and will ensure to report back to you all when he have news to share.
In the spirit of this shift, we have also formally introduced our DAO, and have begun exploring our developed architecture for this project. We are working on releasing a lot of educational material over the coming weeks and months that will showcase what we’ve been working on behind the scenes and we will be taking feedback on these designs in the Discord.
Read about the launch in our letter to the community here:
If the launch of a decentralized, democratically run ticketing provider sounds appealing to you, then it sounds like you’re our kind of people! Join our Discord and learn just how amazing community can be: https://discord.gg/zpfTsAKEbu
A brief moment of reflection
With the outrageously fast pace that the blockchain space moves, we tend to blow past milestones and noteworthy occurrences. So let’s take a sec and appreciate some things that our past selves would be proud to see taking place.
- It has become totally normal to facilitate massive events. Long gone are the days of watching a scarce event calendar creep forward towards the next small venue pilot. It’s time for the big times. Just take a look at a few GET-powered events that took place in the last month!
Let’s say it once more because it bears repeating — every single person you see in these pictures has used our blockchain-based infrastructure to enjoy an honest and easy ticketing process. How wonderful?
- In case you have not been refreshing the NFT Ticket Explorer, we are quickly creeping up on 2 million tickets sold. It took us 5,5 years to issue the first million tickets, and it’s looking like it’ll have been roughly 7 months to issue the second million.
- Did you know our team crossed the magical number of 50 team members this past month? Very surreal and very cool. It doesn’t look like our growth is stopping anytime soon.
- If you want to get to know some of these team members and reflect with us, on July 8th we are having a GET Protocol Summer Party, for team, friends & family (that includes you), and clients. All tickets were quickly snatched up, but we might release a few more closer to the date, so stay tuned.
A parting note
To say there’s a lot brewing would be an understatement. On top of everything we’ve got in the works, there are already new developments lined up for the coming weeks & months that we look forward to sharing. Hang tight and we’ll be back with more before you know it.
