Update January ’20 — K-Pop & GET Protocol join forces
The first month of the decade has been promising to say the least. Let’s quickly discuss what we are going to look at:
Big news from Korea
A K-Pop legends joins the GET advisory board.Media mentions
We go over the press and exposure that’s been reached this month.Business development update
We take a look at ITIX, and, more importantly, the state of white labeling.The utility of destruction
Blockchain developer Kasper walks us through the utility of the GET burning and the future decentralisation of the protocol.
K-Pop legend joins GET Protocol advisory board
Legendary K-Pop artist Mister Won-Kwan Jung added to the advisory board of blockchain ticketing project GET Protocol.
After several years of building the system and creating significant adoption in The Netherlands — selling over 350,000 smart tickets to date — the time is right for Mr. Won-Kwan Jung, or 정원관 as he is known in Korea, to leverage his insight and connections with the goal of quickly establishing a significant foothold for GET Protocol in the South-Korean market.
Mister Jung has a longstanding presence in the South-Korean entertainment business and is known and respected throughout the country.
He is an iconic figure and innovator in the world of K-Pop, owing to the fact that he was one of the three original members of SoBangCha, (or ‘Firetruck’ in English) which is regarded as the first K-Pop group to exist in the world.
More about SoBangCha:
‘In 1987, a trio called SoBangCha (“Firetruck” in English) was stealing the hearts of just about every Korean girl on the peninsula. While it was not unusual for groups to incorporate certain visual styles or complex choreography into their performances, this seemed to be the group the not only standardized these elements into a single format, but seemed to make them necessary for future acts.’ — Source.
Since his years as an artist, Mr. Jung has taken on several other influential roles within the Korean entertainment industry. He was the CEO of ‘Bugs music’, one of the largest music streaming services in Korea with 20 million users. Currently, he is a senior advisor of several major entertainment companies in Korea that manage singers, actors, festivals, and musicals.
Also, Mr. Jung is a jury member of several K-Pop awards.
The GET Protocol team is proud of this addition to the board of advisors and is looking forward to seeing the first ticket sales in Korea get underway.
Maarten Bloemers, CEO of GET Protocol:
‘If you would have told me three years ago that we would be bringing GET Protocol to Korea already, I wouldn’t have believed you — but, here we are. And we are happy to be here!
Thanks to the addition of Mr. Jung, already doors have been opened that I wouldn’t have dared to dream of before — and we are only just getting started.
I am beyond excited for everything that is to come in this new chapter of GET Protocol and our mission for world domination.’
The land of K-Pop(portunity)
The Korean market is very promising for GET Protocol, as it bares lots of similarities to the Dutch one, where the system has been put to extensive use already. South-Korea has a comparable political landscape and a widespread desire for a solution to the problems that exist with regards to the issues of ticket scalping and fraud. The only difference is that South Korea has 9 times the population of The Netherlands.
‘Currently, unauthorized ticket trading constitutes a misdemeanour under the Minor Offenses Act, but only if it takes place on the scene — that is, offline. Online ticket brokers cannot be prosecuted under the law as it is currently written.’ — Source.
With Won-Kwan Jung on board, the crusade for honest and innovative digital ticketing throughout South-Korea can begin!
What’s to come?
The first Korean pilot events have already been conducted, and plans are in the works to quickly roll-out a local ticketing entity that will begin issuing tickets for larger Korean events.
As our foothold and our community in Korea grows, we will also facilitate accessibility to the token and project news for Korean traders!
The timing coincides perfectly with the scaling up of the GET Protocol system and its capabilities. This is in line with the stadium shows, sold-out national comedy tour and recent festival that have been announced over the past year by another user of GET Protocol, Dutch ticketing company GUTS Tickets.
Media Mentions
What’s been published, said and shared?
GUTS lands new festival
Oerrock festival, which has about 35,000 attendees every year, is using GUTS for their 2020 edition, which takes place in May.
BLØF sells honest tickets
The popular Dutch band has ticketed a first events using GUTS Tickets, which is an intimate show at a special venue. This initial cooperation came forth from a mutual interest in providing fans with an honest and easy ticket experience. We hope this can lead to more!
Finformation
GET Protocol CEO Maarten and CEO of this blog, Olivier, were interviewed for an article on Finnish tech website TiVi. If your Finnish is good and you’ve got an account on this website, you are in for a treat! (And let us know what we said because we forgot.)
Burnie2020
The burnback report of Q4 2019 also came out this month. It was the biggest burn to date, and a promising look at how the tokenomics lead to increase in burn due to a rise in ticket volume.
From the burnback report:
In Q4 of 2019:
The GET Protocol processed a total of 350.332 state changes.
A record number of 62 215 tickets have been issued.
To fuel these state changes a total of 98 348 GET has been burned.
There’s no community without ‘u’
In case you haven’t seen it yet — community member extraordinaire Deofex has set up a site that monitors the state changes that take place with tickets on the GET protocol. It provides some cool insights on ticket activity and is updated hourly.
We are of course very happy to have such an involved community. Check out Deofex’s website here. And don’t forget to show him some love in the GET Telegram channel!
GUTS passes milestone
With more and more tickets steadily being sold, GUTS Tickets has crept past the milestone of 350,000 tickets. Now onwards to 400K!
Korean growth
We have seen steady growth in the Korean community , and we have begun the translation of important and relevant blogs, as well as the GET website. With our upcoming Korean activities, we want to be sure that all Korean traders and those interested in the project have the right information to follow along!
Business development update
This phase of the protocol’s development is all about preparing and optimizing future integration. While this used to be one of the ‘future’ milestones, it is becoming more and more of a reality each day.
What up, ITIX!
We realise it’s been a while since the news about ITIX’s upcoming integration of GET Protocol, and an update is long overdue.
Due to the volume of ongoing business for both ITIX and GET Protocol, the process of integration has not been the biggest priority. Besides rapid developments elsewhere (Korea mostly), we didn’t want to rush this process and have been taking our time with the finetuning and calibration— mapping out the process and also finding ways of creating documentation and steps that could be repeated by future ticketing entities.
Now though, we are happy to say that the first phase of integration is complete, and the first smart tickets will begin to be offered through ITIX for a select number of upcoming shows.
With the current developments in Korea and elsewhere demanding attention from our dev teams, we are still not rushing things. We are on good terms and are coordinating the process in a way that is advantageous to both parties.
On a related note to that last sentence, there are some moves being made by ITIX behind the scenes, and we hope to hear some exciting things from them soon.
Due to the many requests from ticketing entities worldwide, we are focussing on making this process as easy as can be. This improvement to the process will also benefit ITIX, hence the efforts for these improvements are given priority.
Harold & Kumar set up a WhiteLabel
Another positive development on that front is that we have made big developments in the accessibility and efficiency of the whitelabeling process.
As CEO Maarten mentioned in his look ahead at 2020, there is a big focus on this for the time to come, as it opens an unlimited amount of doors for the integration of the protocol.
From his blog:
‘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.’
At this point, we are laying the groundwork for all future integrations of the GET Protocol, ultimately leading to a situation where artists and organisations of all sizes can easily start issuing smart tickets using GET Protocol.
This is not some fun idea of ours that we would love to make happen. Business development continues to receive requests from all over the world for bringing our solution to other geographies. Ticketing companies and event organizers of all sorts do indeed realize there is an alternative to the bigger players that have been dominating the ticketing space for all too long.
Therefore, besides delivering continuous quality service to our clients, we are getting closer and closer to making our system available for usage by other parties around the world.
Remember: the humble goal that we have is world domination: three years ago we made it our mission to create a worldwide honest ticketing marketplace, and that’s still our aim. The quicker we can provide all interested parties with a fool-proof start-up kit, the sooner we can plant the GET flag on every continent!
The utility of destruction
By blockchain developer Kasper Keunen.
First and foremost, this blog isn’t announcing or changing anything regarding token economics. It is merely providing a breakdown of why the burning of GET has utility in coordinating and propagating state changes of tickets. A feat that will become increasingly important as the protocol slowly becomes more open-sourced and decentralized. Hopefully, after reading this blog, you will have a better understanding of the purpose of the GET token
GET is the medium of exchange for scalable smart ticketing
This should be old news. But to reiterate; GET is the only accepted medium of exchange to use the scalability and transparency tools offered by the GET Protocol. ETH Gas is used to register data processed by the protocol paid for with the protocol’s fuel: GET.
GET isn’t used as fuel alongside ETH. The Ethereum blockchain is used to immutably register the state data that was produced and processed by the GET Protocol in its ticketing side-chain.
As GET is the only accepted means of payment in the side chain, GET is a so-called medium of exchange role within the protocol.
The case for burning
This medium of exchange argument only explains why GET needs to be used by ticketing companies when interacting with the protocol. The argument doesn’t clarify why GET needs to be burned. After all, other ‘forced’ mediums of exchange such as FIAT money aren’t destroyed when used. When using Euros for example they are transferred to a different person or company. So why do we burn coins? Is it because we want to pump the token‘s price? Read further to find out…
Who cares? Burning makes GET scarce
Sure it effectively doesn’t matter for the market price why GET is in demand. In the end, supply and demand determine a token’s current and future market price. Price discovery doesn’t care about intention, just about the market action.
However, when looking at how sustainable the supply and demand for an asset will be, it makes sense to look at why there is demand. In this regard it is interesting to know what purpose burning has beyond that it is a coded requirement. In the remainder of this blog section, I will lay down the utility argument for why the burning of GET is needed for the GET Protocol to truly scale while at the same time open-sourcing the codebase.
Note: The features mentioned in the paragraphs below are still in development. The ticket explorer code with its documentation is expected to be open-sourced before the end of Q1 2020.
Introducing: ticket explorer nodes
The first step in decentralizing the GET Protocol will allow actors in the public to analyze the ticket state change data and serve it to whomever. This task will be done by ticket explorer nodes. Which have a similar role as ETH or Bitcoin light nodes.
The idea behind having any node system is that there is no single point of truth, thus allowing any actor to make up their own mind given a certain set of transactions/state changes. This is what makes it decentralized. However, such a set up comes at large coordination costs. After all, efficiency is why systems naturally move to centralization in the first place. In other blockchains, we see that the coordination problems are solved by introducing a complex system of incentives (rewards) and skin in the game (PoW, PoS) that combined ensure that nodes eventually come to a consensus.
Coordination
Surely GETs ticket explorers could take the approach of the layer 0 blockchain and incentivize explorer nodes to come to a consensus on the ticket states. However, this drastically increases the costs of running a node and thus the protocol as a whole. While high costs for consensus are acceptable for use cases as ‘hard money’ (like Bitcoin) it makes little sense for the ticketing use-case.
Propagation
In a decentralized network, there is no single source of input data for the nodes to ‘feed on’. To ensure consensus, nodes will need to communicate with each other about what they have observed. This is what to refer to as state propagation. As sharing data constantly costs resources, incentives are often provided in blockchain networks to ensure that nodes propagate.
The GET Protocol is designed to make blockchain ticketing cost-effective & scalable. Ticketing isn’t broken because databases aren’t fast enough in telling if a ticket is validated or not. It’s broken because there is zero transparency and accountability. To prevent solving a problem at the expense of creating a new one, the protocol is better off using a ‘Layer 0’ blockchain to do the heavy consensus lifting, so that the GET Protocol can focus on features that drive adoption and distruption. #LYVQ
Burn address turned API endpoint
So with these considerations in mind, we can pose the question: How to ensure that all ticket explorer nodes come to a consensus, without centralizing the network or needlessly raising coordination cost?
Well, by making the action of burning GET required for new state changes to be picked up for validation by ticket explorer nodes. This essentially creates an on-chain API endpoint by using the burn address as an immutable data feed.
A big benefit of this approach is that the heavy lifting of the sequencing of the incoming transactions is conducted by layer 0 blockchain (Ethereum as of now, Klaytn possibly in the future :) ). It already works out of the box:
Without opponents, no fights
The benefit of using burning over having a receiver when GET is paid, is that when burning there is no counterparty. Meaning nobody receives the GET. In that situation, there is no clear gainer besides everybody that holds GET. Without such conflicts, the code is less prone to be forked as there is no ‘middleman’ to cut out. As users of the protocol are required to hold GET to use the protocol so any change to this burning will be opposed by all other users.
In addition, if integrators decide not to burn or burn too little for the state changes they propose, their state changes will immediately be excluded from the ticket explorers. It’s quite simple actually — which is a good thing.
GET proof of burn — point by point
- Like with the ‘proof of work/block header’ in BTC mining, it is very easy to verify the correctness of a GET burn.
- Providing proof of burn doesn’t guarantee that a state change will be accepted, it is only the first requirement to have it processed/considered by the ticket explorer nodes. As with bitcoin mining, block headers containing false transactions will not be accepted by other miners.
- Proof of burns happen on-chain and are thus immutably timestamped by a fair and ‘un gameable’ consensus mechanism such as POW (possibly POS for Ethereum in the future).
- Burning has a cost, so spamming the network with faulty batches/tx’s is expensive, making it cheaper to run a node. More decentralization!
- The practice of burning has no direct counterparty. Removing the incentive to ‘cut somebody out’ as there is no entity to cut/fork out of.
Surely there is more to be discussed if we move forward in this approach, as for example how to go about checking if enough GET was burned, in a decentralized manner (I have great ideas!). For now, we’ll leave it at this.
Work in progress
This feature is NOT implemented yet. It is still a work in progress. Hence I would label it more of a suggestion/proposal than anything else. If you have ideas, critique or suggested improvements I would love to discuss them!
More servers, more tickets
Servicing high demand ticket sales requires a robust server infrastructure. In addition, the GET Protocol tickets are 100% digital so ensuring the continued availability of state and short response time is crucial.
Global User Service (GUS)
This system ensures GET can run another server for our API in Korea resulting that it’s just as fast even on the other side of the world. Even while you log in with your original (for example, Dutch) account. GUS makes sure that all the user accounts and profile information will be synced, shared and work on each server.
If you want to know more about GUS, check out the technical update of the November ’19 blog.
Long live the Korean instance
Up until now, the GET Protocol has only conducted major ticket sales in Europe, hence our server clusters are currently located in Frankfurt. As we are servicing events in Korea moving forward where we expect the traffic to be far more intense. Our development team has been working on deploying, optimizing and testing the Asian server clusters. To great success.
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.
