GET update May ’20 — This means business
Thinking out of the box is paying off.
….aaaand we’re back. Hope you are all still adhering to the lockdown guidelines of your respective country or sovereign nation. In this blog we’ll go further into the opportunities that were laid out previously, and we will see if they have turned into tangible results. (Hint: Yes.)
Here’s what you have to look forward to:
For the many, not the few
A show of business development progress from a lot of new angles.Sticking to the plan: world domination
We go across borders for some exciting newsInteroperability — The next frontier
Blockchain developer Kasper is back to say smart tech stuff about the GET token and NFT’s.Product Team update
Product Owner Frans highlights a few of the creative solutions our dev team has been working.
But first, some housekeeping
Nocks no more
Dutch exchange Nocks announced this month that they are closing up shop, a move that was spurred on by tighter regulations in the Dutch crypto market. A full statement from the team can be found here:
An important note for traders with Nocks accounts, is to be sure to move your funds off the exchange before July 1st.
Of course this is very unfortunate, and we wish the Nocks team all the best with their future endeavours.
We realize there is a demand amongst GET traders for an easily accessible FIAT onramp, such as the one Nocks provided. We are working on a suitable replacement and will let you know when we have found one.
Bullish bloggin’
Community member extraordinaire, Adnan, wrote this outstanding blog about our humble project, titled ‘The Bullish Case for GET Protocol’.
Check it out, feel free to share it with friends and family, and, if you’d like, you can say ‘well done bro’ in our community Telegram.
Blockchain + ticketing = match made in heaven
Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of certain things, like that life is short, or we are all perceiving life from a squishy brain organ and operating skeletons on a flying spacerock. Ya know, the basics.
What else is right up there in my book, is the ideal combination of blockchain and ticketing. The people at CoinGeek thought the same, and wrote a blog about it, that also mentions GUTS Tickets.
Have a gander, if you like:
Alright, now for some business development news…
For the many, not the few
In last month’s update, we laid out which opportunities we were seeing now that more and more industries are requiring ways to provide controlled access to their locations and business.
We shared the chances we saw for potential new businesses, such as livestreams, museums and more.
Since then, we can safely say that our hunches have been confirmed. Our business developers are busier than ever, and you will find the first significant results below.
This has verified that our shift in focus is warranted and deserves expansion. While the live industry is still in shambles and will be for some time, there is significant demand for our technology elsewhere. Although the original plan was to move at a controlled pace, proving our system one industry at a time, the current market conditions and changing demand has opened doors that can’t be ignored.
The use of our system will change from fewer large events such as festivals and concerts, to many more smaller events, such as daily admission to, let’s say museums.
Speaking of museums, let’s go over some of the business developments that this past month has brought us…
The art of the deal
Museums was one of the potential markets that showed promise. Due to Corona regulations, there was a huge demand for a digital reservation system that helps facilitate a comfortable and safe visit. In Holland, museums are allowed to open again on June 1st, providing they offer their visitors a safe and controlled experience.
‘Safe and controlled experience’ just happens to be our middle name.. So, the sales team started reaching out. They reached out real good:
Over the course of this past month, GUTS has added eight (8) museums as new clients.
These museums are all making use of the digital ticketing system that allows them to offer timeslot-reservations and full control over their admission. Since museums have daily recurring ‘events’ and transactions, insights such as these are crucial.
Not only do they have a real-time dashboard that shows exactly how many people are in attendance at any time, they are also able to contact any individual ticket holder directly should this be necessary.
This can be of great added value when reminding upcoming visitors of updated rules and guidelines, or even potentially notifying them of an infected visitor who was present on the same day as them.
Starting in June, these new clients will put the system to work. This is of course a great result, and not only the result of our sales team, but also the tireless effort of our flexible developers. Product Owner Frans will go into more detail on those efforts below.
Brick by brick…
In other pivot-news, we have added a new API partner: Wunderbricks; a property management platform that uses innovative tech to streamline and improve all processes related to managing real estate, from office spaces to stores to residences.
Using the GET Protocol infrastructure, Wunderbricks is developing a system that provides access and control to notable players in commercial real estate.
This cooperation was formed after identifying the large potential demand for a system that offers companies of any size a system that allows for safe and controlled access to office spaces.
The team at Wunderbricks is finetuning their approach and a first pilot is currently underway. We hope to bring you more news from this front soon!
Livestream & chill
Let’s not write off artists completely just yet, shall we? Popular Dutch rockband Di-rect announced a new livestream concert for their fans on June 6th, ticketed by GUTS. As they were planning to do a string of tours before COVID struck, this livestream was a nice way to at least connect with fans and play their latest hits.
The media attention for this show was enormous, partly due to the fact that fans could determine their own price for these tickets.
This lead to thousands of tickets being sold already, and people even ‘waiting in line’ to make sure they got theirs. (Not that there is a max capacity of any kind, but I guess old habits die hard.) Thousands of tickets sold also means a lot of state changes registered on the protocol, which you can of course always track here.
A second GUTS liveshow is already also lined up, with The Voice Of Holland 2019 winner Dennis van Aarssen announcing a liveshow for June 7th. Click on the image to check out tickets and details.
The livestream shows are an interesting innovation from a technological view. Since there is no longer a physical venue to provide access to, the ticket itself becomes linked even more to the user experience. Our development team has been working hard to make this as cool as possible, and we can’t wait to do many more.
Sticking to the plan: world domination
As was laid out in the plans for 2020, the goal for this year was to expand the usage of our protocol internationally. That has continued to be the case; even though the world has started to look drastically different from what everyone expected, our plans for global expansion remain unchanged.
As it stands we have progress to share in three other countries. These developments are the results of our ongoing efforts of making our solution easily accessible and adaptable for any market.
We are seeing the opportunity for our digital wallets in many markets and many countries, as demand grows for airtight crowd control solutions and digital reservation systems that are available, effective and scalable.
Let’s take a look at some exciting GET-related developments across the world, shall we? (Pretty soon this blog will become just a list of updates per country, but we will deal with that when the time comes…)
South Korea
Let’s start with somewhere familiar. The Korean user of the protocol, getTicket, has updated their website to show the first event that they will be ticketing in Seoul! A great milestone.
The event is an exhibition about the immensely popular TV show ‘Hotel Del Luna’, and is slated to open its doors on June 6th.
As is common with South Korean events, there are multiple ticket vendors that sell tickets for the exhibition. This is a great way to serve the first Korean users of getTicket and will provide valuable action and feedback in the lead up to the bigger events expected to take place this year.
Germany
After some good ol’ Sherlocking from our beloved Telegram community, it was discovered that there is now also a German ticketing company that is preparing to make use of GET Protocol… Introducing TecTix!
Focussed mainly on sporting events, TecTix is a recent initiative with high ambitions, that was started by well-experienced players in the German event industry. Making use of the GET Protocol, they are planning to apply all the benefits of a truly digital ticketing system — secure access, no scalping, effective direct communication — to the world of sports.
We will keep you updated on their achievements as they progress!
Bella Italia
Following the news that the GUTS application was translated to Italian, some speculation began its about potential purpose. Since we’re all about transparency, we’ll spill the beans.
An independent sales agent in Italy has been finding opportunities for GUTS, which has recently resulted in serious leads and a first deal. Where? On the beach, of course.
There are many, many beaches in Italy, and they all have chairs to rent out and food & beverages to serve. I already hear you thinking ‘But that sounds like a situation that could use a solid and innovative digital system!’ and I must say you are absolutely spot-on.
To give you an idea of this market:
There are 8500 beach clubs in Italy, with about 200 chairs per location. Beaches are open about 150 days per year.
In last month’s dev update, Frans highlighted the new upsells feature. This makes it easier than ever to not only reserve specific beach chairs, but also order lunch or a drink. Orders and payments are all done directly from the app, so there’s no interference with your tanning.
This is a very recent development, and we will bring you more news from Bella Italia as it reaches us.
Interoperability — The next frontier
By blockchain developer Kasper Keunen
In recent months the GET Protocol has added several new types of clients to its portfolio. In this section of the blog we will cover what added value the GET Protocol brings to its new client base.
Before getting started into the added value of the blockchain and its token in the new environments, we will briefly reaffirm the token economic principles of GET.
Every state change of the event-asset that is fired, a certain amount of GET will need to be paid to the protocol. This GET is then bought back from the open market. Part of this GET is burned, making the token scarcer moving forward. More about tokenomics.
Usage agnostic burning
From the perspective of GET Protocol there is no difference between a free ticket or a paid ticket. Ticketing companies servicing these clients always need to pay/burn GET to process a state change. In other words, it is for the ticketing companies to decide how they make money on free tickets, the GET fee is due regardless.
Similar on how Gas needs to paid when transacting and interacting with smart contracts on Ethereum. The intent of usage is irrelevant for the price paid in gas costs.
When providing smart ticketing principles are applied to museums, offices or beaches — the effective service provided to the client is the same. In the end it is about issuing rights of entry(unique digital assets) to identities efficiently, safely and with as little friction for users as possible. The GET Protocol is performing this service to the clients in the new vertical, only now the definition of efficient and safely have shifted.
As the eventual usage behavior of every ticket varies (holders can choose to trade, share or up sell) inherent flexibility is needed to prevent too much support is required. Our unique ability to add event specific ‘market rules’ of the digital assets allows for flexibility while still keeping control where this is needed. In the regular ticketing use case, transparency is needed in order to ensure all actors act honest. In the upcoming paragraphs we will review the added value of this feat in the context of our new verticals.
Safety first, transparency second
Over the last years, we have used our smart ticket features to prevent ticket scalping of high-in-demand events. With as goal to eradicate fake tickets and let organizers sell more tickets efficiently. In this regard, the blockchain has mainly delivered on the much needed transparency in the issuance of tickets.
Due to unfortunate viral circumstances the ability to control supply and demand of entry using smart tickets (with rules of interaction) has gained usefulness in other industries as well. On first glance, the novel use cases in question do not seem to benefit from the usage of blockchain and/or additional transparency.
With event ticketing, the focus of the market rules mainly was on preventing scalping & scamming. Providing immutable transparency is key for coordinating this effectively. For the new applications, the rules of the market will be geared to safety.
The lack of ‘added value by transparency’ is most evident in the new sectors the GET Protocol will be servicing. Museums have marginal reselling problems. There is no open market for office seats. On first sight, the added value of using blockchain seems to be missing.
The additional control and certainty for issuers over the rights of entry is currently the key selling point driving demand. Let’s briefly cover what this means for the token utility. In short, the utility value isn’t effected in the short term, in the long term this development pushes us to better integrate the token into the interoperable digital asset. How we are going about this interoperability in a technical sense, refer to the final paragraphs of this section.
The fact that we can guarantee the utility value gives assurance in the short term but should strongly motivate us to build a token economic model that relies on network effects for the token to be used.
As we believe the big opportunity lies in creating the standard, forcing usage of our token by a closed source service is contra-dictionary.
Blockchain should not be utilized for the sake of it — but because its data and consensus features are the right fit for the job. For a long time we have eyed NFTs to be the next frontier in our efforts to revolutionize tickets. As our objective is to maximize the utility of GET within our smart ticketing protocol, it makes sense to apply GET to this new angle.
In the following paragraphs I will provide a brief overview of the opportunity as we see it, with some technical bites for those with appetite. More in depth information will be provided as soon as our research and testing is complete.
GET fueled non fungible assets
The new demand for smart tickets is fueled by the fact they provide issuers flexible and dynamic control over the attendees. One general theme one can identify with the new types of clients testing and using the protocol, is that their ‘events’ are more continuous in nature (i.e. are repetitive).
In addition, the areas being ticketed are large and are more open ended as the ‘closed loop’ festivals and theater shows(strict start, end & area). Public spaces like a boulevard or beach contain a wide variety of business (shops, bars, restaurants). If these restaurants want to be able to take reservations they might need to coordinate with the area at large to check if this person is allowed/registered to enter the general area of the venue.
For such a check to occur either the table booking system and area system need to be the exact same system or share a database. This is unlikely to happen. To still make this coordination possible we propose a interoperable data layer that allows for the exchange of specific targeted information across systems by using NFTs.
Below I have listed several hypothetical questions for both the office and public space use case. None of them are necessarily indicative of current leads, they merely serve as a possible use-cases the NFT module should be able to solve.
- Does the person reserving a table have the NFT allowing access to the general area in the appropriate time slot?
- Do the people in the group belong to the same group/order?
- Are the employees booking the conference room allowed to come together? (some large corporates split their employees up in teams, restricting their interaction to reduce the risk of mass-infection affecting operations).
- How many venues/places did this wallet/account/group visit today?
To be clear, using a blockchain is not needed perse to check these requirements. A well thought out and implemented central database would work just fine in answering the questions/queries. However, in many large environments such databases rarely emerge/exist. This is because the actors involved have different use cases and incentives or are simply too uncoordinated.
The key take away is that the need for a interoperable data layer will become essential in ensuring that consumers can go about without much fuss safely. We believe that as time progresses, the willingness for consumers and employees to adhere to restrictions and registration will erode quickly.
By ensuring that systems are able to communicate, safety can be controlled without a hit to the experience. In such environments having an agnostic base layer as a blockchain with unique assets marking certain rules or traits of the owner (like ERC721s). Coordination between systems could be achieved.
This will pose a challenge for those that are responsible for the safety of their attendees (as well as distancing and tracking regulations). The GET Protocol has extensive experience in providing a user friendly ticket that allows for the issuers to maintain a certain amount of control.
The role of GET
Of course using NFTs isn’t innovative in its own right. Applying them for tickets isn’t either. At the moment the main research objective lies in integrating the GET token economics into the NFT asset.
One of the concepts we expect to use in our effort to merge non fungible tokens with fungible tokens (GET, Dai) is the ERC871 composable token standard.
ERC871 — Composable tokens
An ERC871 type of NFT acts as a ‘basket’ for other NFT or FT (like GET or DAI). Meaning, that a NFT is able to own other NFTs and even ERC20s. We are currently testing how to batch and combine different tokens to match use cases we know to be valid.
If you are curious about how it all works, check out the code and transactions on the Testnet etherscan contracts listed below.
NFT(721) Consumption: Ropsten Etherscan
NFT(721) Priviledge: Ropsten Etherscan
NFT(721) Coupon: Ropsten Etherscan
NFT(871) Order: Ropsten Etherscan
NFT(871) Batch: Ropsten Etherscan
ERC20 GET: Ropsten Etherscan
ERC20 DAI: Ropsten Etherscan
Product Team update
By Product Owner Frans Twisk
It’s been some weird few weeks, months even, for all of us. The arrival of Corona meant the product team had to put aside most of our roadmap and start designing and building for completely new verticals, businesses, use-cases, whatever seemed possible. Because let’s face it: we won’t see a massive crowd at big events anytime soon.
What we do see is a lot of creativity in our current market: artists livestreaming their shows, drive-in theatres, corona-seating algorithms. And these ideas are what we have been working on.
For famous Dutch band Di-Rect (amongst others) we added the ability to embed external livestream services in our web-app, with a special way to show and access their stream from within your ticket wallet.
This means that they can offer access to this livestream only for people that actually bought tickets. Since we are not a livestream service, we simply allow the artist to pick and control any existing streaming service out there and link it to a ticket, behind our pay-wall or not (linking a public livestream is also an option).
Next to that, something else happened: markets that usually wouldn’t be in need of a smart-ticketing suddenly are: museums, restaurants, beaches, you name it. And they know how to find us!
A lot of these have one major thing in common: they sell tickets for events that happen on a daily basis that have similar configurations. Something we call recurring-events. Next to that, they want to offer time slots to their customers, to avoid overcrowding and respect the Corona guidelines.
To help manage recurring-events (with lots of tickets & time slots) and present these in a better way, we are working on several features: like automatically generating events for every day of the year, global ticket-management across multiple events, improving customer journeys; all kinds of new use-cases that we previously didn’t really need to support.
In this month’s blog we briefly want to highlight one of these features: the event datepicker. It simply allows you to group all your recurring events in one (embeddable) shop where the visitor can pick their date, time & tickets. It works alongside the multiple-shops we also offer, and you have complete control over what events & shops are published in this view. You can even show multiple events on the same day if you have a special night-program for instance!
This is just the start of many things to come to serve these new markets and concepts, and we will for sure have new shiny things to show you in next month’s blog!
More about GET Protocol
As always, if you have comments, questions or suggestions, please drop in to our active Telegram channel here.
Our Korean Telegram channel can be found here, and the GET Naver page is here.
If you want to know more about what we do, read our whitepaper, visit our website, or join the discussion on the GET Protocol Reddit.
