Update September ’19 — Everything is falling into place
Progress on all sides.
Aaaaaand we’re back!
Once again we’ve got a lot to go over; this month we’re going to cover the following segments and topics:
Ticketing news from GUTS
We’ve got several new sales to discuss and a new comedian trying us out.Business development from GET
Another trip to Asia has taken place, solidifying ongoing talks and plans.Technical Update: Presenting Stoolbox
Great news from the tech team as our new and improved ticket-registration approach comes closer to seeing the light! Let us walk you through it.A quick token economics update
Insights on what we’re working on and where things are headed.Watercooler Talk
The latest from around the office, featuring yet another new hire, some great press and a look back at last month’s community meetup.
Here we go.
Ticketing news
New sales! New New artist!
Audio Obscura brings light to the winter with SKALAR
GUTS Tickets client Audio Obscura is continuously innovating in order to provide their tens of thousands of visitors from dozens of different countries with original, top-of-the-line event experiences. They may have outdone themselves this time though, by bringing SKALAR to Amsterdam.
About SKALAR:
A stunning audio-visual kinetic art installation SKALAR by light artist Christopher Bauder and musician Kangding Ray will land in Amsterdam in January 2020. This large-scale artistic production is a collaboration between Berlin’s design and art studio WHITEvoid, Amsterdam electronic music promoters Audio Obscura and one of the city’s most important cultural venues, Westergas. Last seen in Berlin in 2018 where it delighted many thousands of people with its cutting-edge blend of kinetic mirrors, perfectly synchronized moving lights and intense sonic soundscapes, SKALAR will reside in the iconic Gashouder in Amsterdam from January 10 to February 5, 2020.
Check out what the installation looked like in Berlin last year:
Every day, hundreds of people will come to the installation, which will be set up in the cultural complex ‘Westergas’, at their ‘Gashouder’ location, pictured below. All tickets are sold using GUTS Tickets.
Some facts about the Gashouder location:
Surface: 2538m2
Length: 53,8m
Width: 53,8m
Height: 14,5mTheatre: 2100 persons
Dinner: 1100 persons
Reception: 3500 persons
We are excited to be a part of such an innovative event, and glad to do our part with our smart ticketing solution. This type of month-long art event with lots of daily visitors is of course a whole new type of event for us and our system.
This substantial experience and exposure in a new market is very valuable, as it strengthens our track record, puts us in touch with new organisations and players in the event industry, and introduces thousands upon thousands of new consumers to our system. All excellent things in our book.
If you want to learn more about the event or want to scoop up some tickets for yourself, head over to the SKALAR website.
In other Audio Obscura news, this upcoming month a fun little get-together called Amsterdam Dance Event is taking place. (ADE is the leading conference & festival for electronic music.)
Audio Obscura has a bunch of events during this long weekend, all of which are ticketed by GUTS. There are still a few tickets available for a couple of these events. Click the image below to check out the events and get your tickets.
It feels great to be introducing GUTS to the masses during such a big an internationally renowned event!
Man, Man, Man, that was quick
Earlier this month the three guys behind the immensely popular podcast titled ‘Man, Man, Man’ announced a full-on theatre tour in 2020 on twitter:
GUTS has ticketed individual shows for these three guys before, but for this nation-wide tour we once again joined forces and GUTS ticketed five of the shows. It took less than 24 hours for the complete tour to sell out entirely:
Live podcast events are a growing industry, which is extra interesting for GUTS due to our experience with ticketing hundred of theatershows. We hope this is only the beginning of our podcast adventure.
Who’s this joker?
This past Thursday we started ticketing the first try-outs for Ronald Goedemondt’s new show.
Ronald is a veteran of the Dutch comedy world, who, besides his many theater shows, has also had his own sketch tv-show which ran for several seasons.
He is part of a group of popular stand-up comedians called Comedytrain, and Ronald is represented by De Keet, who also represent GUTS ambassador Jochem Myjer.
Remember him?
These try-out shows for Ronald were sold-out within a few minutes, which wasn’t a big surprise, considering Ronald’s popularity.
Smaller try-outs of this kind are a kind of practice run for new material, to workshop it and construct a new show.
Providing these first few events are a pleasant ticketing experience for Ronald and his fans, and the try-outs go well, there could very well be a new tour in the making.
Business development — GET Protocol
CEO Maarten and Business developer Sander went back to Korea at the very end of August, to continue ongoing talks with several parties there.
Through these talks and introductions with key players, the plans for adoption of our ticketing solution in Asia are becoming increasingly tangible.
More and more we are finding the need for honest ticketing in Korea and other Asian markets, and are very happy with our valuable contacts there and the rate at which the plans for business development are taking shape.
It should not be long before the initial steps will see the light, at which point we can begin to share them with you!
Of course we couldn’t go to Korea without paying a visit to our friends at Ground X, who are working hard at finalizing and guiding Klaytn to worldwide adoption.
With the recent launch of the Klaytn mainnet, we are now exploring its technical capabilities and weighing the potential fit for GET in terms of tech, business development and all-round synergy. That’s right, I said the S-word.
We want to be clear about the fact that we are purposely taking our time with this and not rushing into any commitment or change for ourselves and our community before it is abundantly clear that this is the way to go.
The future is looking brighter and brighter, so we want to carefully and responsibly navigate all aspects of our business towards an optimal scenario.
Also, just a friendly reminder:
It’s already been quite a productive year, but somehow it feels like things are just about to get started.
Technical update: Proudly presenting Stoolbox!
From blockchain developer Kasper Keunen.
Over the last months, we have been working on scaling the registration of our smart tickets on the blockchain. We are excited to announce that this project(called Stoolbox) is nearing production readiness in the upcoming weeks!
Stoolbox doesn’t only change the way we register tickets, its working also improve the value proposition of GET. To read more about what drove us to redesign our blockchain approach from the ground up please check out the blog below.
Smart ticket blockchain requirements
Before getting into how Stoolbox works, let’s start by listing the requirements for the blockchain approach we had when we started out. Note these feature requirements were formed in 1.5 years of selling blockchain registered tickets. This experience makes us certain that if implemented correctly, the features of Stoolbox will become a key driver in the protocols value proposition.
- Scalable, reliable & cost-efficient processing of transactions
With the expected sales pipeline ahead of us, it is paramount that the blockchain registration part has to be able to process millions of tickets in a cost-efficient and reliable manner. A feat Ethereum surely didn’t provide out of the box as we learned the hard way.
2. Maximum transparency while respecting consumer & client privacy
Publishing datapoints to the blockchain only make sense if there is any meaning full information in the data that is made public. It should be possible to draw meaningful conclusions from the data, conclusions that expose certain public concerns.
However, the published data points should not compromise the identity of attendees(GDPR) nor the event marketing efforts of the event organizers themselves(implied scarcity can be a big marketing tool for event organizers. Exactly like it is for ICOs #hype #fomo).
3. Implementing the protocol should be non-invasive for any backend
To make it easy and cheap to integrate with the GET Protocol, we need our blockchain solution to easily integrated into the backend of integrating ticketing companies. To do this we have to assume that no ticketing system is built the same. Therefore Stoolbox needs to focus on generalizable concepts that will be compatible for a wide range of architectures.
For example, we want to make it possible for ticketing companies that still use static QR codes to slowly make their tickets a bit smarter/digital. Forcing companies to go full-digital at once is too big of an ask. By making implementation of ‘smartness’ gradual we aim to lower this friction. We have already seen this approach pay off!
4. An indispensable for GET
As the protocol scales and more unknown actors start using its features the economic fundamentals need to remain robust. We need to ensure the native asset won’t be forked out by an actor. Policing everybody doesn’t scale and can become technically hard as we open source. Hence if we want to ensure GET remains the unit of account within the protocol, the token must be made indispensable in its use case.
It might be hard to imagine this indispensibility angle so let’s use a metaphor. Let’s say you are monetizing a network of roads, you could do this with placement of toll-booths at all exits. As paying a toll fee doesn’t benefit drivers in their quest, they will choose not to pay this fee if there is a possibility to do so (like take an illigal route around a toll-booth). Hence you would need to invest in preventing this from happening. A different monetization approach would be to be the only company selling fuel to these cars(including an additional fee on top of the fuel fee). Drivers of cars cannot choose to not use fuel, hence no policing would be required as fuel is indispensible for a car to operate.
Whereas now GET is the only allowed currency to pay for protocol features, it will become the fuel required to get anything done in the GET Protocol. Like fuel, GET should be indispensable for a smart ticket to work in the GET Protocol(think Gas/ETH).
Stoolbox & ticket transparency
The idea behind Stoolbox is to provide data for the ticket explorer. This will be a consumer-facing application that allows ticket holders to explore the history of their smart tickets by only using the blockchain as a data source. Feature-wise the ticket explorer will be similar to what Etherscan is for transactions on Ethereum, with the important caveat that the ticket explorer will be very easy to understand for anybody!
This was just the tip of the iceberg. Want to know all the ins and outs of Stoolbox, how it works and what this means for the protocol and even its effect on the GET tokenomics? Check out the full blog here.
Tokenomics Update: What to expect
Working hard to make things simple
As we stated in last month’s update blog, we have been working on an updated tokenomics for the GET token. The aim being to simplify the somewhat complicated & extensive documentation that has existed on this topic up until now.
We are hard at work making this one-stop document a reality and will share it as soon as we are sure it is as kick-ass, complete and effective as we want it to be.
Less words, more numbers
An important addition to the tokenomics is the proof of validity and possibility of speculation. That’s why we are developing some accessible tools that will allow everyone to make projections on scarcity and the demand for GET (and the speed of the subsequent GET burn), based on relevant metrics.
The tools we are working on right now:
1.) Ticket explorer
Transparency and accountability are key factors for us, hence a main priority at this point in time is to make it possible for everyone to see real-time executions of smart tickets on the protocol as they occur.
Besides providing insights into ongoing activity, this initially basic explorer will also form the ground-level for additions in complexity down the road.
2.) Token scarcity calculator
In order to make projections on the future of the protocol and the rate of the burn of the GET token due to demand from ticketing companies, we are planning the release of a scarcity calculator that works with relevant variables and can simply provide theoretical scenarios on the rate and demand at which GET will be burned in the future.
Of course our developers’ time is probably our most valuable resource, so we do not expect these tools to be done instantly — ticket sales of existing and new clients obviously have higher priority, but know that these tools are being worked on!
Watercooler talk
How I met your community
Firstly, thanks again for coming out to the GET community meetup last month! We had a blast, and we hope those who attended enjoyed themselves. Below are a few pictures from the event, if you want to see more you can find them on the GET Protocol Instagram account.
For those who weren’t there; we kicked off the evening with a few speeches. First Maarten thanks the community for their continued support, then frontend developer Natalia walked everyone through some recently developed features. (Most of which you can also find in this blog.)
Before the party was on and we started talking, networking and dancing, Kasper and myself announced the new upcoming tokenomics in a joint-effort speech that was worthy of a keynote spot at the United Nations Summit, if we do say so ourselves.
Did you say ‘speaking’?!
Speaking of Kasper and speaking of speaking and speaking of the combination of those things: Kasper spoke at the Statebox Meetup in Berlin on September 21st.
As you will undoubtedly remember, Statebox is our valued partner with whom we are figuring out how to use the best aspects of blockchain while avoiding the downsides of using a developing technology on a daily basis with consumers who expect a topnotch level of service and experience.
If you want to read more about exactly that, I recommend very much that you read this blog:
After Kasper shared his wisdom and findings, he was also part of a panel on category theory alongside Jelle, the founder of Statebox, and an MIT professor who was expert on the subject. In Kasper’s own words: ‘I think I understood most of the things that were said. Not sure though.’
Welcome Ameya!
This month we are welcoming Ameya to the team. Let’s get to know him a bit, shall we?
Welcome to the team! First off, could you introduce yourself?
My name is Ameya, and I am 21 years old. I am Indian, but spent the first few years of my life in France. I became interested in programming during high school, leading me to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Despite the fact that my facial expression rarely changes, I enjoy conversing with people and getting to know them better.
What have you been up to prior to joining GUTS?
I spent the last 3 years completing my Bachelor’s in the Technical University of Eindhoven, and this is my first official job as a developer.
What are you going to do here?
I am going to work as Junior Backend Developer. This involves working with our various systems and learning as much in the process.
What made you want to join the team?
As a recent graduate, I was eager to find a job where I could apply the skills I had gained during my studies. Working as a Junior Developer was the perfect opportunity as it makes use of my current skill-set while allowing me to learn while I work with cutting-edge technology. Trying to rid the world of ticket fraud is always a plus.
What do you like to do in your off-time?
I am a big fan of football, and I enjoy both watching and playing it. I also play video games in my spare time. I regularly practice yoga and am soon going to learn how to play the saxophone.
Most likely to sell honest tickets
GUTS was featured prominently in this years edition of The International Ticketing Yearbook.
The International Ticketing Yearbook 2019 (ITY), the latest comprehensive review of the state of the global ticketing industry.
From the book:
‘In the simplest from, GUTS has come up with a technology that prevents unwanted third parties from intervening in the ecosystem between event organiser and the end consumer.“…in 2019, GUTS managed to attract big and prestigious clients, who came from the traditional ticketing companies.”’
The print edition will be distributed at events including Reeperbahn Festival in Germany, Eurosonic Noorderslag in the Netherlands, Moscow Ticketing Forum in Russia, Ticket Summit and Intix in the US, LatAm in Chile and the Ticketing Professionals Conference in the UK over the next 12 months.
To check out the full yearbook, head to the link below.
That’s it for this month! Thanks for reading, we look forward to the exciting times ahead and hope you are doing the same. Stay tuned!
More about the 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.
