Update December ’19–GET 2020 vision
We’re looking forward to the new year.
2019 has been a fairly massive year for GET Protocol in terms of adoption, development and exposure. I wouldn’t be exaggerating when I say that this has been the year that GET Protocol truly proved its merit and application. The doors have been opened for global expansion, and we are charging full steam ahead.
That’s why for this blog, we are doing something different and instead of purely recapping, we will also be looking forward for once.
Content:
Quick housekeeping
We run through everything notable that’s taken place in the past month.General business
CEO Maarten Bloemers shares valuable insights on the ticketing industry, what has been achieved, and what is yet to come.Blockchain & Tokenomics
Developer of both these topics, Kasper Keunen, will walk us through every interesting development there is to cover — along with the things he’s excited about for the year to come.Marketing
Marketeer and blogger extraordinaire Olivier addresses the road ahead in terms of marketing.Business development
International business developer Sander shares some insights and sentiments on the (potential) new business side of things.Technical development
GUTS Tickets Product Owner Frans Twisk shares the latest achievements from the dev team, along with the many things he’s looking forward to in 2020.
Housekeeeeping
Since there is a lot of ground to cover and we don’t want you to miss your new years celebration— we’ll quickly go over last months’ news.
GET was listed on Hotbit!
An early Christmas gift came in the shape of a new listing for GET. Hotbit has over 500.000 registered users, and brings GET within reach of tons of new potential traders. More about GET and exchanges below.
Trade GET on Hotbit by clicking on the image:
GUTS Tickets was featured on Now Go Build — the Amazon webseries that highlights innovative businesses from around the world. The show is hosted by Werner Vogels, fellow dutchie, and CTO of Amazon. Check out our episode below, GUTS is featured around 10.30.
The interview covered a lot of ground on the topics of tech, the GUTS origin story and our ticketing solution. It also delivered some good promotional material:
Although we were honored to be approached for this platform, the final edit left out several points and nuances that were relevant to what we do, specifically with regards to the application of blockchain technology. Although this is not a huge surprise coming from Amazon, Maarten provided some more context on this in a Twitter thread, which you can check below.
Maarten was also a guest on ‘Cryptocast’, arguably the most popular Dutch crypto podcast. You can check out the episode here. (In Dutch, unfortunately.)
The tickets for the Eurovision Song contest 2020 went on sale this month. The organisation has been very vocal about their intention to prevent unwanted reselling and skyrocketing prices. GUTS pitched for the event and came close to winning, only being beaten out in the last round by a more traditional ticketing company.
Within an hour the tickets were being resold on the usual resale platforms, exposing fans to crazy prices and potential scams.
Oh well, it’s the thought that counts I guess?
Sandy Khaund, vice president of blockchain products for Ticketmaster, made some statements this month about the benefits of blockchain technology when applied to ticketing, basically publicly acknowledging what we have been propagating for a few years now.
This is a good development of course, as it validates our approach and solidifies the fact that GET Protocol is a front runner in the ticketing of the future.
Just for fun real quick, here’s my favorite quote from the speech:
“We want fans to get more value out of their tickets, while ensuring that tickets end up in the right hands.”
It’s obvious that the bigger companies such as TicketMaster are jumping on the bandwagon to remain relevant and extract more money from fans by claiming to be innovative. A private blockchain of course does not do consumers any good.. We’ll see how it plays out.
The GET team did a couple of AMA’s this month; in the CryptoDaku & CryptoDiffer telegram groups. If you want to read back the recap of that last one, you can do so here:
Since our community and daily chatter on Telegram is growing, some questions or comments aimed at the team may get lost. Also, some questions or thoughts may be too specific or extensive to properly deal with in Telegram, or, sometimes team members will simply be too pre-occupied with their daily work to give a thorough answer.
For these instances, we have set up a Reddit thread, where community members can ask their questions and be sure to get a response. (Please allow a little time for a decent response — most of us here are just human.)
If you would like to do so, you can ask your question here:
A third stadium show was added for Dutch singer Guus Meeuwis. GUTS does the ticketing for these shows, which will be held at football club PSV’s home stadium in Eindhoven. Tens of thousands of people of all ages will be using their blockchain-registered tickets to enter the event. Hashtag adoption.
As is usual with large sales, we ramped up our support team so that we could help out any potential consumers with questions. Except this time — crickets.
Our support team barely had anything to do, as thousands of our smart tickets were sold to happy fans. We’re definitely doing something right.
Where we stand & where we are headed
By GET Protocol & GUTS Tickets CEO Maarten Bloemers.
So, how are we doing?
In short: Excellent… but we can always do better. The thing I’m most proud of is that we are now at the level to be fighting with the big ticketing companies. We’ve lost a few pitches, but also won a few — announcements are in the making ;-). Battling with the behemoths within 4 years since our founding, proves to me that we’re on the right track, and we’re just getting started.
Lessons learned
Almost four years in the midst of the ticketing industry gave us some valuable lessons and they are not that pretty. The industry is littered with vague signing fees, kickbacks and other ways to drain money from the pockets of fans.
Truth be told; often the ticketing companies just take the blame for managers, bookers and venues who are not willing to adjust the prices of a ticket. They maximize their profit by receiving kickbacks or signing fees that are collected through ticket fees. Here are some more insights we’ve used to tweak our strategy.
Small vs. Huge;
There are two types of ticketing companies, very big ones and relatively small ones. There is virtually no middle ground. This inequality has spiralled out of control and the threshold to enter the market is huge!
Road to market
Most of the new players in the ticketing market failed. The ones that succeeded did so by growing with a new upcoming vertical.
Money talks;
Signing fees and kickbacks of hidden fees decide if you land a client. Everything else is secondary.
Patience;
Sales cycles are very long. Landing a new client takes years, not months.
Fans will pay whatever, whenever;
A major player in the industry said it best to me after a few drinks: “After over two decades in this business, it never ceases to amaze me how much fans will put up with just to see a fucking show. Never underestimate what a fan will put up with.”
Mum’s the word;
Management, bookers, agents, venues do not care about scalping or fraud and do not want the market to be transparent. Artists do, and often have no idea how revenue is split between the actors in the value chain.
Race to the bottom;
Online ticketing is highly scalable and therefore the fixed cost component of organisations is huge. This results in a race to the bottom in terms of ticket fee. Ticket volume counts.
Control is key;
While we’re trying to bring transparency to the market our competitors are doing the opposite. All major players are copying our concept of a closed digital ecosystem to be even more in transparent and … drain some more money out of pockets of fans.
Value of secondary market;
Is HUGE and everybody is getting a slice. Time for true transparency.
Missions & Models
We’ve implemented these learnings and tweaked our strategy. Our road to mass adoption consists of 3 models which are — mostly — launched in subsequent phases:
1. GUTS tickets
Showcasing and battle-testing the possibilities of truly digital ticketing on blockchain by servicing a new vertical; content creators in the Netherlands.
2. Whitelabel
Scale vigorously by making our tech available for parties who were not able to make the large investments needed. Usage only costs GET, nothing else. New and existing ticketing companies, integration in third party applications or a simple plugin. Start selling tickets under your own brand within 1 hour.
3.) GET Protocol
Become the worldwide standard for tickets on blockchain. Create a plugin for existing ticketing companies that is extremely easy to integrate but with all the functionalities and transparency.
Onwards!
We believe we’ve achieved our first and foremost goal with GUTS tickets. We’re a well known name in the industry and are servicing major clients in the Netherlands. All necessary features are in place and we’re ramping up to showcase some more crazy possibilities with truly digital tickets.
With the currently signed deals for GUTS only, we’re growing by 182,9% next year.
The emphasis for next year, however, shall be on scaling through the whitelabel (or Lingchi) model. Bringing down the ticketing behemoths requires a flood of new players who weren’t able to reach the threshold to seriously enter the market before or didn’t even consider selling their own tickets.
By radically enabling anybody who is willing to sell their own tickets by merely using GET, we believe to disrupt the ticketing market in a big way. As Bob (not the Alice one) put it: “Times they are a-changin…”
Token economic review & outlook
By Kasper Keunen, blockchain developer at GET Protocol.
In 2019 we conducted a decent amount of experiments on the token economics of the protocol. Moving forward in 2020 it can be expected that we will continue to experiment and improve on the economics of the protocol.
We believe that over 2018 & 2019 we have identified and tested what are the most effective economic primitives. In this process, we have found that several of the concepts as described in the initial white paper, needed to be revised. Having found a solid fundament from which the token derives value, we believe the next phase is communicating our proposition to the open market.
Building a liquid market
Having a protocol token in the open market only has a function(beyond being a speculative vessel) if there is a liquid market for it. Proper price exploration will allow integrators to hold and use the protocol as they do with any other utility on their books. The primary objective of our token economics is to have a liquid market.
We are convinced that liquidity is achieved by focussing on 3 pillars in 2020:
1. Maximizing token exposure. Ensure that supply and demand for the token are able to find an equilibrium. It has become evident that our current exchange offering does not meet this standard, therefor additional listing has been secured.
Meaning: In Q2 we will add a major exchange, pending on certain factors.
2. Providing provable data. In the traditional financial markets, very little of the action is fueled by the contents of a blog. While quarterly reports are full of words, these words are context, in the end, it is the cold hard numbers that make the difference.
Meaning: In 2020 we will push to ensure that both supply as demand for GET can be determined purely by data present on the blockchain.
3. Simplify & Decentralize. Complex systems scale horribly. If only a select few are able to figure out what is really going on, a protocol is unlikely to be trusted for anything more than gimmick features.
Meaning: In 2020 we aim to greatly reduce the amount of ‘moving parts’ in the economics of GET.
Ticket interoperability 2020
At the heart of the GET Protocol, it’s the ability to make tickets truly digital. Having a fast and transparent data layer to store the relevant ticket states is a key requirement for the platform to truly scale. Why is that? Because without a clear way of checking, registering and propagating ticket changes of a ticket there will be no consensus about the current state of all tickets. Without a standard, it is not possible to track tickets distributed by different sales funnels. This fragmentation creates huge inefficiencies for both issuers and buyers.
More funnels, more $ale$
Digitization of tickets brings along a wide array of benefits; less scalping, fraud and better fan data. However, the client making the buy decision will always prefer the system that boosts their ability to sell more tickets. Artists might tweet with their hart, but mo$t of them $ign ticketing contract$ with their wallet.
Issuance of tickets on different platforms (and by different ticketing companies even) is very common in the industry. Something we have witnessed ourselves during ADE.
For the protocol to have mass-market appeal, being able to process, track and monetize tickets from different funnels is crucial. Including tickets that we would classify as ‘dumb’. This does not mean we are compromising on ticket security, we are merely allowing less secure tickets to be tracked alongside smarter tickets.
Luckily there is a big downside for ticket issuers when using multiple funnels with ‘dumb tickets’. After the QR codes are issued to a funnel, they cannot easily be revoked, changed or interacted with. It is like exposing your private key in public, even if you manage to delete the key quickly. You can never be sure it wasn’t stored, until its too late.. Take for example this instance:
There is no way of knowing who is right or wrong in this Ticketmaster case(although I would dare to take a bet). Due to their reputation, everything they say that requires the public to trust will not be believed. What if they were telling the truth all along?? THE INJUSTICE!!! probably not though lol.
No party can make any meaningful claim in this case. The ‘dumb QR codes’ cannot be tracked as they are essentially naked private keys. We cannot figure out who sold the ticket and from whom this ticket originated. This situation favors those that like the shadows and doubt. It draws out bad immoral actors. Let me introduce you to; the ticketing industry.
Back to reality, ‘disagreeing with capitalism’-as a service never really took hold with the mainstream. So we Duch socialists better not finger-wag too long to the big bad wolf called ‘driving shareholder value’. If we want to improve the way tickets are issued we better $peak Benjamin$.
Let me try.
More transparency, more sales
The key idea of the GET Protocol is to standardize the way we register a ticket changing state. Regardless of the back-end of the ticketing company. With such standardization in place tickets of a single event can be propagated to funnels, without losing control. Tickets of an event could be issued on multiple funnels, with only the necessary state changes about the fundamental state of the ticket being propagated (so no sensitive information companies do not want to share for competitive reasons).
Finally; the sound of the cash register
The GET Protocol ticket transparency add-on will allow ticket issuers to track tickets of an event across several funnels. Allowing them to optimize funnels as they go. In addition, they are able to effectively interact with the current owners of a ticket.
Every hour Stoolbox registers a batch of ticket statechanges to the blockchain.
There is no information to be extracted from only analyzing a single ticket mutation in such an IPFS batch. Only when the complete history of the graph tree is downloaded and analyzed is it possible to determine to draw conclusions. This iterative process of crawling the IPFS batches and building a state-tree is conducted by the ticket explorer.
The work on achieving this interoperability between ticket inventories is still ongoing. There are a lot of problems to solve and tools to be built. By open-sourcing the GET Protocol standard as well as all the ticket explorer code we aim to instill a open source developer community.
The GET Protocol Ticket Standard
The first documentation and specifications on how the GET Protocol registers events, tickets and more will be released by the end of Q1 2020. This technical specification will allow anybody with an internet connection to verify the ticket data as made public by the GET Protocol.
In order to effectively demonstrate the type of transparency we are providing, the GET Protocol Foundation will open-source the first iteration of the ticket explorer. Both the open-source code base of the explorer as expected to go into production towards the end of Q1.
“Let the hashes do all the talking.”
The Klaytn Connection
In 2019 we announced that we have partnered with Klaytn, a Kakao subsidiary, one of Korea’s largest internet conglomerates. As of writing (December 2019) GET is still an Ethereum based asset. But as our cooperation with Klaytn intensifies it seems more and more likely that GET will swap blockchain in 2020.
Going for a swap is an intensive and complicated process. Therefor we do not take this decision lightly and are taking the time.
As our own presence in Korea will grow in 2020(if this message is still here it has slipped passed Olivier, hurray!). Klaytn is working towards great things. Let me list a few:
The Klaytn Launchpad
In 2019 Klaytn has mainly focussed on laying the foundation for their blockchain. They boarded 50+ businesses. Added very prominent members to their governance counsel. Large influential companies as Samsung, Upbit, Kakao, Binance and more have joined the ecosystem!
These developments have further solidified our belief that with help op Klaytn, the GET Protocol will be able to scale faster.
The Klaytn Platform
The prominent blockchain companies in the Klaytn ecosystem might help the protocol to get things done on the b2b front. The most exciting opportunities of being part of Klaytn don’t come from their network/influence but from the reach of their daily userbase.
Klip, the Klaytn digital wallet
One of the most exciting aspects of Klaytn is how they plan to integrate a crypto wallet in the Kakao talk-app(220M registered users, 50M active users). The GET Protocol is an inherently mobile focussed product. By integrating into the Kakao ecosystem and having access to their reach. Klip will enable us to make trading smart tickets as seamless as sending a text message.
We see tremendous opportunity in possible integration between GET Protocol and the Kakao ecosystem, both for the GET token directly, as with smart tickets and functionalities of the protocol.
Klip is also immensely easy. Once you access Klip with your social network profile, especially your KakaoTalk ID, you send and receive digital asset with your Kakao friends. Further, you do not have to jot down your cryptic private key. Klaytn’s own unique account system allows you to access the wallet with a simple passcode while allowing you to still manage your own private key.
What’s to come in terms of marketing
From marketeer & in-house blogger Olivier Biggs.
In 2020, further increased marketing efforts can be expected, both in terms of the cryptosphere as in the mainstream international media.
We expect to attract significant traction in the upcoming year, to warrant this continued push and convince the many people who still haven’t heard of GET or our solution. With the rate of our growth and the doors that are opening, we consider ourselves one of the most effective blockchain and crypto projects out there, and we think that a spot in the top 100 projects is not an insane goal.
To get there, we will of course need to reach more people and show them what we are achieving. After building and fine-tuning every aspect of our solution over the last few years, it’s time to make noise.
Now that we are officially selling tickets in multiple continents and significant international developments are starting to take shape, we feel it is time to shift gears.
As mentioned by others in this blog, the focus in 2020 is international adoption and usage. The Korean and in extent Asian markets are proving to be very fertile markets with huge potential. We plan to take advantage of this potential.
Aggressively taking on this new market, means we need to present GET in its most optimal way to traders, exchanges and even new ticketing companies. This means liquidity, marketing and, yes, listings. We are undertaking action in all three of these components.
As we have previously always been product & development focussed, these ramped up efforts are not budgeted for in the runway. Thus, we will be allocating a portion of the User Growth Fund (both in GET and FIAT) to fund these ramped up efforts.
We will undertake this campaign with the same consideration and carefulness that we have put into all of our efforts over the last few years. We have always gone to significant lengths to please and inform our community, far beyond the average project out there, and we hope that our track record in terms of transparency and reliability deserves enough trust to allow us to undertake this at our discretion.
The success of the protocol is directly related to the success and usage of the token, we simply can’t have one without the other. We are extremely proud of our community’s level of involvement and will continue to keep you involved as we embark on this next phase!
Talking business development
By Sander Regtuijt, business developer at GET Protocol.
“How can we do what you guys do as soon as possible as well?”
As business developer, this question pops up in my inbox very often. Parties of all kinds and geographies interested in leveling up their ticketing solution: event organizers, ticketing companies, artists, third party ticket sellers, not-yet-existing ticketing companies, venues, you name it.
At first glance the answer is usually: “Yes, we do want to process your tickets.”. If only it would be that simple though. There is a lot more involved with ticketing than just distributing admission rights. Think about integration of payment systems, the current applications these parties sometimes already use and don’t want to give up, particular local demands, the actual and potential ticket volume that’s connected to them and so much more.
Our goal has always been and still is: GET Protocol to become the worldwide standard in ticketing. In order to reach that goal it’s absolutely pivotal to remain a scalable and flexible tech company. In the past this meant that we couldn’t offer the assistance and commitment for certain parties to develop their products on top of ours.
In order to iron that out and more easily serve more and more diverse types of users, we improved the GET Protocol documentation in 2019. Any party out there can basically develop a ticketing front-end on GET Protocol with a relatively low investment in terms of money and efforts. It’s truly exciting to see parties doing just that. As always, we will let you know as soon as possible, when this has led to actual sold tickets. We will keep pushing this route in 2020.
There are also parties that not only see value in integrating GET Protocol, but in the products of GUTS Tickets as well. Therefore we not only made GET Protocol more accessible for any ticketeer out there, but also started making it easier for other parties to use the GUTS Tickets applications in a whitelabeled fashion. We started with this approach this year and are already reaping the benefits. If you have been closely reading our blogs this year, you know that we dipped our toes in K-Pop crazy South Korea. Although the scale of ticketing issues such scalping in South Korea is huge and the country could easily claim one of the biggest targets for a radically new ticketing practice such as GET Protocol offers, we don’t consider our entry here as the end, but rather the beginning of more to come for the ticketing standard we develop.
Whitelabeling the GUTS Tickets products will certainly help us, so we will keep pushing this approach in 2020 as well.
All in all I believe we are still very well-positioned to indeed become the worldwide standard in ticketing and we are spreading our wings overseas as we speak. We learned as we went in 2019 and I don’t feel we could be more prepared for 2020.
Development update
By GUTS Tickets Product Owner Frans Twisk.
The product team has ended 2019 with a bang, by delivering (among other things) a massive feature that can be used for a multitude of use-cases. We call it: shops!
Introducing Shops
In a nutshell it allows you to sell tickets, each with their own properties, through multiple channels to different audiences, and track sales.
Here are some use-cases that can be executed using shops:
- I want to do a ‘presale’ to sell 50% of all tickets to a special group of fans or members who will get a link in their mailbox.
- I want to sell tickets through multiple (marketing) channels with a limited number of discounted tickets, for partners to promote to their customers.
- I want to create a special link with limited discounted tickets, which can be spread by ‘influencers’ on social media, and track their conversion.
- I want to invite guests on my ‘guestlist’ through a unique on-time-usage link where they can claim a limited number of tickets for free..
Creating and managing tickets in different shops is super easy: each event comes with a default shop, but with a click on a button you can create a new shop with its own set of (discounted) tickets, its own url, layout and more…
Introducing Pools
The powerful thing that combines all your shops is the usage of “pools”. Each ticket sells a certain maximum number of entrance-rights (or any other type of product), and this number can be set in a pool. Tickets (in different shops) can share the same pool, so you can be sure to never oversell your event!
Simple example: if my regular shops sells 50 tickets of the maximum capacity of 500 set in the pool, all other tickets that use the same pool have 450 left.
Of course you can also limit the number for a specific ticket only. You can even sell tickets that use a combination from different pools, e.g: a ticket that gives you an entrance-right plus 2 drinks. Or a full-weekend ticket that gives you access to both days, thus lowering the number available for the separate Saturday and Sunday tickets.
The possibilities are endless, and we haven’t even gone in depth about how this can improve marketing and campaigns. We are really proud we launched this powerful feature and already it has been used by several organisers in numerous ways. I’m sure it will be used in 2020 a lot, even in ways we did not foresee!
What about 2020?
While the product team works extremely agile, there is of course a strategy and general roadmap, although priority is not always set in stone. The first few months of 2020 are actually pretty well defined, so here’s a list of a few of the bigger features we will be working on (they are kept vague on purpose):
- Offline support in the mobile ticket wallet app;
- Secondary-ticket-market;
- Ticket-explorer;
- Scaling;
- Discount codes & vouchers;
- Scanner profiles;
- Communication & notifications…
… and much much more. We are really noticing the growth in our userbase is resulting in a lot of small and big wishes from existing and upcoming clients!
One of the things I look forward to is to work on improving our secondary-ticket market and its rules, features and user-experience. As you might have read in our ADE blog, we learned that our current market-rules are simply not enough for some audiences. With the feedback we collected from this, we have immediately gone back to the drawing board and have a new design which will be launched in 2020.
The other thing that excites me is that external ticketeers that are and will use GET Protocol will really start using their custom implementations upcoming year. This means our products will be used in a completely different way and I’m sure we will learn and grow a lot from this.
Long story short: We are ready for 2020!
And that wraps up our last blog of the year. We hope you are as excited about the next year as we are, and that leaves us only one thing to say:
More about GET Protocol
Any questions or want to know more about what we do? Join our active Telegram community for any questions you might have, read our whitepaper, visit the website, join the discussion on the GET Protocol Reddit. Or get yourself a smart event ticket in our sandbox environment. Download the GUTS Tickets app on iOS or Android.
