GET April ’23 — Disruptors
Folks, hold onto your hats, because the Disruptors are in town. Well, multiple towns (and cities) specifically, as April was filled with networking, speeches and panel discussions taking place in 3 different cities across the world. As you can imagine, it was a perfect time to share insights into our products and ethos so there’s plenty to unpack in this month’s blog, let’s take it away!
April 23 Stats Snapshot
Tickets Sold:
During the month of April, a total of 96,537 tickets were issued by protocol partners. To fuel this ticketing activity, partners utilized roughly 34,221 GET which has been locked into event smart contracts.
Events Facilitated:
A total of 36,243 tickets were checked-in at events during April, which resulted in 32,854 GET being unlocked from the event contracts, subsequently flowing to the Protocol treasury, Staking rewards and DAO treasury.
For the two fortnightly periods of staking rewards in April, 47,939 GET flowed to stakers via ticketing fees earned. This number includes GET accrued at the end of March into April.
Event Round Up
In April, a number of events went on sale through protocol partners and at the same time, a number of events took place! Here’s some of the most notable:
Ticket Sale: DI-RECT — GUTS Tickets
https://www.di-rectinahoy.nl/
Right at the beginning of the month saw the return of DI-RECT announcing an additional show in their AHOY lineup in December. The sale took place in the first week of April.
Ticket Sale: De Fabriekstour — Djebber
https://djebber.nl/defabriekstour
De Keet’s all-star comedic talent have joined forces once more with a range of event dates now on sale for ‘De Fabriekstour’ that’ll take place from the end of May through to early summer.
Event: Chef’Special
https://www.ziggodome.nl/event/6571258577/chefspecial
On April 29th, the Chef’Special crew will be gearing up for a killer performance at the Ziggo Dome facilitated by GUTS Tickets! That means thousands of everyday fans getting to enjoy a seamless ticketing experience that allows them to focus on having the time of their lives
Disruptors: BD’s Trip to The Ticketing Business Forum
In April, a delegation of our business development team took to the skies & set off for Manchester, UK to attend the annual Ticketing Business Forum; which is a meeting ground for players deeply entrenched in the ticketing industry.
The industry insider attendees of the conference come from across Europe, Asia and the US to discuss the latest ticketing innovation and network for new opportunities, which made for a perfect place to discuss our NFT Ticketing technology.
Simon Klinkenberg, business developer at GET Protocol:
‘The 19th and 20th of April, GET Protocol attended The Ticketing Business Forum ’23, held in the beautiful venue of Old Trafford Cricket stadium in Manchester. Besides meeting stakeholders from the ticketing industry, we were also there because of our nomination, in the category “Disruptor of the Year” — which is already a decent form of recognition. we can proudly say that we won this award, after being judged by a jury of peers from the industry.
The last couple of months we have noticed a substantial increase in traction on our Digital Twin product, which has helped us shift our focus to connecting with existing ticketing companies. Many are already investigating the benefits of Digital Collectibles and the benefits of blockchain. Paired with the recent news of Ticket Master trying out token gated ticket shops, this puts GET Protocol in a sweet spot.
The low friction integration with the Digital Twin creates endless opportunities for the integrators of Ticketing companies. A lot of the integrators like sport clubs and federations were also attending TBF23, and most are actively considering the right approach for a web3 strategy.
Connecting with these stakeholders and receiving the disruptor award made TBF23 a very successful conference for us, and I look forward to the follow-up with all parties we’ve spoken to.’
Recap NFT.NYC
This month also saw another edition of NFT.NYC, for which a part of the team traveled to New York. Our CEO Maarten Bloemers was asked to host a panel on the intricacies of smart contracts and their ability to influence consumer behavior. Other members in the panel were Georg Mueller from Bam.Ticketing and Mike Dragan from Oveit, who shared their experiences from issuing NFT tickets in their respective regions.
Aside from the conference itself, the trip provided ample opportunity for meeting partners and prospects, which we took full advantage of. Overall it’s safe to say the trend is that most business is done at side events and private meetings, which we attended, around town.
Publicly it’s safe to say that the NFT industry is desperately looking for legitimate use cases to validate its existence. Nearly every organisation or individual has ticketing at the top of the list, so being able to show our track record there definitely helps bring in some additional interest across the board.
We prefer it like this; where the hyperbole and hypotheticals are taken out of the equation and proof of work thrives.
Representing our Roots — W3B Lab Amsterdam
With our company deeply embedded in the tech vibrancy that is Amsterdam, we’re always keen on being a part of Web3 experiences that burgeon in our home city. This month, W3B Lab who host a number of creative initiatives brought together a panel to discuss the blend between artist creativity and ownership, with the rapidly growing world of Web3, NFTs and AI.
Our marketeer, Colby took part in the panel to discuss GET Protocol’s role in providing the ticketing tools for artists & organizers to take control over their event revenue & fan relationships. The panel also included Max Tiel from Thunderboom Records & Rutger Tideman from The Poser Party.
ETHDam side event
On the note of events close to home, in May Amsterdam Blockchain Week or ‘ETHDam’ is taking place, with various hackathons & speaking events occurring around town.
We’ll be aiming to have a presence at a number of these events, as well as a side event of our own. More info to be shared about this next week.
Fuel Forensics
Since the protocol’s V2 launch last year, all fuel activity by partners can be monitored directly on-chain and through helpful tool’s such as 0xMartijnb’s NFT Ticket Dune dashboard.
This under the hood transparency provides a lot of insightful analytics into the ongoing activities of protocol partners and acts as a further interface in monitoring the progress of our mission to build a protocol with activity by many partners around the world and not just by growing a monolithic ticketing company through GUTS.
The fuel usage of partners is a great gauge of how their activity affects adoption both from a usage and protocol value accrual perspective and there’s some interesting data points to highlight.
The graphs above taken from 0xMartijn’s Dune dashboard showcase the difference in reserved fuel vs spent fuel of partners. To clarify these two terms:
Fuel Reserved: is fuel that’s been locked into an event contract once a ticket has been sold.
Spent Fuel: is fuel that’s released from these contracts at the moment a ticket is checked-in at an event, subsequently going to the Protocol, DAO or Staking rewards.
This means that as fuel is spent when a ticket is checked-in, the amount of reserved fuel will decrease linearly as it is transferred from the event fuel contracts to the protocol, DAO and staking addresses.
If we compare both reserved and spent fuel rates from the 1st January 2023 to the end of last week on the 23rd April 2023, we can see an increased level of fuel usage across the board and especially by three partners in particular, Ontapp, Djebber and NeonOx.
Let’s take a dive into their spent fuel history first:
Since the 1st January, Spent Fuel for these partners has increased between 2–5x as a result of a number of large events taking place in Q1. For Djebber in particular, the constant flurry of theatre events during the quarter championed a giant kick off in fuel spent with 20% of this figure making its way to staking rewards as tickets were checked-in.
When comparing these spent fuel levels to reserved fuel, if a partner was to sell no additional tickets during the quarter, then we’d anticipate reserved fuel to go down as spent fuel goes up, so let’s jump over to have a look at the reserved fuel figures:
Impressively, even with the high rate of spent fuel in Q1 of this year, reserved fuel has only gone up or stayed roughly level, indicating that integrator sales activity remains high during Q1 with tickets waiting to be scanned at a later point in time.
Dive into more of these stats on the Dune Dashboard here.
Free Tickets for xGET OG Revolution Pass Holders
Last week we excitedly revealed our first external reward for GET stakers in the form of free tickets for Web3 Berlin taking place 10–11 June!
As GET stakers are heavily aligned with the long term vision of the protocol, external rewards are an additional layer of benefits for the core believers in the protocol’s mission & as such we aim to continually provide new rewards that add a tasty cherry on top of the core reward streams.
With Web3 Berlin utilising GUTS Tickets for their ticketing & being closely aligned with what NFT Ticketing can offer, it made perfect sense to align on a reward for the community & show off token gated ticketing rewards in the process!
Grab your OG Revolution Pass: Here
Grab your free Web3 Berlin Ticket: Here
The Roll-Out of Our Dynamic Secondary Market
One of our most distinctive product features that appeals to ticketeers and event organisers alike, is our secondary market that allows tickets to be re-sold directly in-application without any third party marketplace or touts exploiting the process.
This re-sale functionality is a critical piece of the White-Label offering & is often the key feature that brings new prospects onboard. Whether it’s to retain revenue & data or to simply avoid the awkward press situations of using a ticketing system that allows for external exploitation, we know just how important the system is for our clients.
For these reasons, we’ve been keen on improving the system, with an update long on the horizon finally reaching the sunny shores of shipment for the EU and soon to be UK markets.
What does the Secondary Market 2.0 or aptly named ‘Dynamic Secondary Market’ add to the table?
Autonomy of Re-Sale Rules & Payments for Event Organisers
With the Dynamic Secondary Market update, event organisers now get secondary sales revenue in a completely automated manner exactly like primary sales. It’s as easy as plugging in their own Stripe account, to get upfront secondary sales revenue in their own account.
What’s more, EOs can set the rules of re-sale dynamically, adjusting the upper and lower bands of re-sale prices for fans. EOs earn fees from the sale itself not just the profit a fan adds on top.
Importantly, this system is also flexible to accomodate local regulations, so that for example, if a ticket must be restricted to 100% of the face value, then this is entirely possible & what’s more the EO will still earn fees from the sale whilst ensuring the re-sale operates completely legally.
This means that going forward, our White-Label is the only ticketing system that can truly enforce ticket prices and legally dictated margin bandwidth which is perfect positioning, particularly in the dawn of welcomed regulation proposals & bills..
Regulation is…coming?
While governments around the world stumble over themselves to further confuse and obstruct anyone working, trading or participating in crypto, there seems to be some movement on the ticketing side as well. The recent outcries from consumers (see Taylor Swift sale) lead to another round of governmental inquiries in the U.S., which eventually resulted in yesterday’s introduction by U.S. senators of the Unlock Ticketing Markets Act.
This act is a direct attack at the stronghold that Ticketmaster / Livenation have held in the events industry:
Klobuchar said: “Right now, one company is leveraging its power to lock venues into exclusive contracts that last up to ten years, ensuring there is no room for potential competitors to get their foot in the door.
“Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences. ‘The Unlock Ticketing Markets Act’ would help consumers, artists, and independent venue operators alike by making sure primary ticketing companies face pressure to innovate and improve.”
More:
While initiatives of this kind can take forever and its effects remains to be seen; the tangible pressure coming from regulators could very well result in a situation where integrators of our tooling in the U.S. stand a much stronger chance to achieve further adoption and marketshare, due to the focus on fair business practices. We welcome the opportunity to increase the speed of our roll-out in North America, should the opportunity present itself.
More closer to home in the Netherlands there has been a clear trend of unruly secondary market fatigue, with locally operating ticketeers beginning to go for their own versions of merged primary & secondary markets. (This was of course pioneered by GUTS back in 2017.)
This trend comes amidst another round of political outcry about the dangers of scalping, against which new potential measures have been announced recently. Of course we all know that scalping is not an issue with any GET Protocol infrastructure, as comedian Jochem Myjer pointed out nicely once more, linking to white-label integrator Djebber.
All in all the effect and feasibility of these regulatory initiatives remain to be seen, but if it comes, our tooling will be the perfect existing solution to allow event organizers to operate exactly within the defined margins.
Product Feature Articles
Last but not least, we’ve been busy ramping up product feature articles & sharable usecases on the stories section of the website so that our sales team and community alike have the ammo to ‘bring home the bacon’ when it comes to onboarding new prospects into clients!
The latest of which delves into 5 past usecases of how our technology has benefited artists and event organisers with each one going into a unique functionality of our tech. Take a swing at it here:
That’s it for this update, next month we’ll have new exciting news to share with you — see you then!
