GET June ’23 — Digital Twin 2.0 & Accessible Custodial Wallets
Greetings and welcome back to another GET Protocol monthly blog! As June comes to a close and with it the first half of the year, we’d like to use this blog to mainly focus on an upcoming piece of hotly anticipated infrastructure that we’ve had on our radar since launching on Polygon but has finally been in production over the last few months — Custodial Wallets & how this plays a critical roll in the Digital Twin 2.0.
Excited? Before we dive into our solution and the technical efficiencies we’ve put into place, lets first zoom out and focus on the grand vision at play.
Chapter 1: The Vision
‘The most accessible Web3 onboarding tool — period.’
Bold statement? Yes. Justifiable statement? Absolutely.
It’s no secret by now that we’re incredible optimistic about the growth trajectory for Web3 as the next layer of the internet.
After all, Web3 promises a way for anyone to truly own their digital assets through infrastructure that’s non-censorable, where composable assets make up an inter-operable internet.
That simple promise aligns perfectly with why we started our mission at GET Protocol — to put control and ownership back in the hands of creators and their audiences, eliminating walled gardens, opaqueness and third party control.
For creators, this means a way to foster a mutualistic relationship with their community, one which isn’t siloed to a single social media platform & the relationship between a creator and a fan isn’t owned by the platform but by the creator itself.
That’s what an NFT represents — access rights.
Access to a community, Access to content, Access to ownership rights, Access to value that can’t be taken away by a 3rd party.
Chapter 2: Reality Check
So if that’s the benefit of a Web3 internet — why are we not living in this utopia already? Why does it feel like things have stalled and no one really cares anymore?
An answer to that question would need to take up a much larger space than this blog, but here’s a few quick reasons.
- Onboarding into Web3 sucks
- People’s confidence in Web3 has been undermined by a few bad actors
- People crave convenience & can be resistant to change
- Web3 benefits become more apparent over a longer time as both collective understanding and applications mature
We live in a world where convenience exists in the palm of your hand, whether it’s paying with a click on your phone, ordering food to your house, creating artwork with a few mere words, being able to recover your password in a few simple steps, the convenience list goes on.
Now imagine.. you can order from 100 places to eat all at the palm of your hand, but first write down and confirm your 24 secret recovery phrase before ordering your takeaway!
So with that said — why the heck would the average person jump through 5 hoops to access benefits that aren’t immediately apparent?
Well here’s the thing, the majority absolutely won’t.
We need ways to seamlessly bake Web3 benefits into Web2 convenient experiences.
Until now, almost every single first experience into Web3 has been a sort of ‘destination’ and not just a part of the user journey. What I mean by this is that for most people the first ever touch point into Web3 hasn’t been a background process — it’s been a conscious touch point, whether its friction filled or frictionless. Here’s some examples:
- Signing up at an exchange to buy assets
- Creating a wallet
- Signing up for an external NFT drop
- Signing up to play a Web3 game
Do you see the pattern? Each of these touch points is a conscious destination — the user needs to actually want to participate in this ecosystem. That’s not really going to work in the short and medium term if we know that most people want convenience and won’t be aware of the benefits over the long term.
What if you onboard a user into Web3 through a Web2 destination, where the Web3 tech is fully in the background & no conscious decisions need to be made by the user?
And that — ladies and gentleman is why we’ve built a scalable custodial wallet solution so that anyone no matter age, technical knowledge or whether they really care or not can access the world of Web3 directly through their ticket.
Chapter 3: Seamless Onboarding
Why onboard a person into Web3 via their ticket?
Because of what a ticket represents, here’s a Web2 asset that:
- Is already an established form of ‘access’ in society’s consciousness
- Is delivered directly to a user via existing distribution channels
- Is a connecting bond between two or more parties (Artists / EOs / Fans)
- Comes with understandable ownership rights directly out of the box
Naturally these properties translate incredibly well into the benefits on offer with Web3, the only remaining thing to accomplish is convenience & that’s where custodial wallets come into play.
What is a Custodial Wallet?
For those unfamiliar, a Web3 wallet is simply a way to store and interact with digital assets registered on the blockchain. A custodial wallet therefore is a way to store and interact with digital assets without the user needing to manage their own private key or secret recovery phrase. It’s a way to reduce the friction of creating and owning a wallet, abstracting Web3 lingo and knowledge and implementing it into a Web2 friendly user flow.
In the case of GET Protocol, anytime a ticket is issued and processed through the protocol, whether via the White-Label or Digital Twin, a new wallet is created seamlessly in the background.
Once the wallet is created, the NFT Ticket is immediately distributed onto this wallet.
Chapter 4: Web3 Onboarding at Scale — Digital Twin 2.0
In September 2021 we introduced the Digital Twin to the community as a way for existing ticketeers to get started with NFTs, Digital Collectibles and Web3.
It’s safe to say that since that point, adoption of the product has been admittedly slow as we gauged the product market fit for the product and explored it’s usecases in the events industry.
But here’s where that changes.
With the Custodial Wallet solution, we’re on the precipice of a 2.0 re-launch of the Digital Twin. Why is that the case? Well, Convenience.
Integrating with the Digital Twin and getting users to engage with the benefits on offer just got a heck of a lot more frictionless.
This means that any event application or ticketeer can direct distribute collectibles to attendees all on a unique wallet for each user.
Web3 onboarding just became mainstream at the scale of millions per year.
When putting this revelation into the context of the ‘Digital Twin 2.0’, here are the benefits going forward:
- A Digital Collectible direct in the hands of the attendee
- A Web3 wallet, that’s a new fan data point akin to a form of ‘Web3 cookie’
- Seamless gating of digital content direct from an integrated app or our upcoming Wallet UI
Digital Collectibles — but sexy
With a whole new way to make use of the Digital Twin, we’re also keen on upping the experience level of receiving a collectible & prospects that we speak to around the Digital Twin are getting a whole new look at the ways they can create their collectible.
Here’s just a taste of what’s on offer:
A) Unique Metadata per Collectible
Gone are the days where every ticket holder gets the same event Collectible. Via the Digital Twin, a simple script can make all the difference in providing unique Collectible metadata and artwork per ticket. Whether it’s legendary, rare, common Collectibles or using randomness to extend the story of an event through individual art pieces.
B) MP4 & 3D Collectibles
We’ve created a template for 3D Collectibles (in an .mp4 file) that prospects can use, you may have seen the format during our Memories announcement last month!
The Digital Twin User Flow
Along with upgrading the delivered value for ticket holders, the convenience of the user journey is really most critical to adoption.
The good news is that the user journey also got a serious upgrade as an integrator now has two primary options for integrating the Digital Twin:
A) Directly integrate the Digital Twin into their native application
B) Utilise our upcoming ‘Wallet UI’ site.
A — Native Integration
A lot of event organisers, creative agencies, marketing partners and even ticketeers have their own integrated environment, typically in the form of a mobile app.
They can now integrate the Digital Twin so that anytime a ticket is issued, the user is assigned a custodial wallet in the background which is then tied to the user’s unique ID in their system.
Anytime a user logs into the application, they can effectively see and interact with collectibles in the front-end application. The integrator builds the front-end to view collectibles & we handle the issuance, distribution and wallet creation all through the API.
What’s more — because the wallets are custodial, we can effectively ‘Web3 Enable’ any event application so that token gating can be done directly from the app.
This could be in the form of a QR code scanner built into the front-end that supports Wallet Connect QR codes and app switching. Anytime a user goes onto a token gated site, they can scan the Wallet Connect QR code directly from the event app. Their collectible is then checked in the background and access into the content is granted — seamlessly.
B — Wallet UI
For integrators that don’t have their own native application, upon Collectible issuance, our Digital Twin will return an email access link to the ticketeer or event party. The access link can then be emailed to the user in which they can directly view their Collectible.
As our Wallet UI is still in development, we’ll be sure to reveal further details in the coming months.
Chapter 5: A New Beginning
So there we have it, the convenience of a user flow that suits Web2 natives, with the core benefits that Web3 has to offer.
It’s safe to say that this system has been a long time in the making and we hope that this gives you a thorough understanding of the vision and execution for the Custodial Wallet solution and what we’re gearing up for with the Digital Twin 2.0.
We’re excited internally to be able to finally lay some cards on the table & rest assured we’ll be revealing the true system and execution in its full glory in the months to come, it’s certainly not the final whistle you’ll hear from us on the DT 2.0 or Custodial Wallet strategy.
With this in mind and our excitement around what we have in the pipeline, We ticketed AND attended SEG3 this past week — where we were able to meet and discuss our latest innovations with representatives from major players in the sports & entertainment industry.
To name a few:
Besides the above average networking opportunity, we also took the stage to give an in-depth look at our product offerings and benefits. He’s a (somewhat grainy) image of Colby showing off the digital twin.
It was an incredibly productive event to be a part of, and our business developers have weeks worth of work in following up.
Bonus Chapter: Technical Feats of Custodial Wallets
With the long term ambitions of accessible, true NFT ownership in the hands of everyday attendees and importantly believing that the time was right to bring this to market, the engineering team took the reigns on development and work began on creating a technical architecture describing how to implement wallets into the existing systems.
Naturally, security of Web3 wallets is of utmost important and experienced web3 users often recommend storing blockchain keys and NFTs on hardware wallets like Trezors and Ledgers. This is because online systems are vulnerable to viruses, hackers, and various kinds of attacks.
Naturally operating a ledger for the thousands of transaction requests that would come with custodial wallets for all GET Protocol ticket holders would be a simply unfeasible task. Instead of doing this process manually, a lot of time has been put into making a secure environment where we can store private keys. Whilst we can’t share this technical structure for safety reasons, we are very confident that the private keys for our custodial wallets are stored very securely. Even if you were to download all our databases, copy all our storage, and hack your way into the wallet front-end, you will not find a trace of a private key.
After we developed a secure system to store private keys, the next challenge was to provide each user with a wallet. Until now, integrators requested NFT tickets via our ticket engine without providing user information.
We made a change that allows integrators to send a userID together with the request. It’s up to them how such UserID looks like; they can use the userID they already use in their internal systems, or they can create new IDs. Our ticket engine is designed as flexibly as possible, so any company can easily integrate with it. When we receive a new userID, we create a new wallet for that specific user. When we receive a userID that we already know, the new web3 ticket will be added to the wallet created during the previous request.
With the above changes, we can now create new wallets for all our end-users and bring to life the benefits of Web3 adoption at scale, from NFT Tickets to Collectibles to Token Gated Access!
A Return to Traditional Programming
Here’s other news from the protocol and industry this month:
Desperate times call for innovation
Festivals and live events are seeing increasingly tough times, as costs and events on offer are rising rapidly around the world. A new report from this month details how UK festivals are struggling to break even amidst a changing economic environment.
This echoes other recent news of various artists cancelling their tours, citing similar reasons:
https://www.itv.com/news/2022-10-11/why-more-musicians-are-cancelling-tours-at-the-last-minute
It’s a worrying trend for all supporters of live music and independent artists. We hope that our Event Financing Module (if you are unfamiliar with this product there is an extensive breakdown of its workings and purpose here) can play a part in (re)opening these doors for the event organizers and fans who crave to see their favorite artists around the world.
We will share updates on recent developments in product development and market fit insights before too long.
The Big 4
This month we crossed the magical milestone of 4 million tickets issued by the GET protocol.
You would think this is a nice chance to stop and smell the roses, if it weren’t for the fact that there were more tickets to sell. (We are close to crossing 4,1 million at the time of writing, ten days after the 4 million mark.)
Several big sales from both GUTS Tickets and white-label integrator Djebber pushed ticket numbers up and made the GET Protocol Ticket Explorer chart frequently look quite bullish:
Of course we are far from satisfied and are excited to share more business news soon that will help us get to 5 million even quicker.
Even more at stake
Staking participation has increased once more; at the time of writing close to 1/3rd of all circulating supply GET is in the staking contracts, receiving rewards from global ticketing activity. This is a figure we are very proud of.
That’s it for June! Next month we’ll return with a more traditional blog and following up the revealed custodial wallet and DT 2.0 information. Stay tuned for that and we’ll see you next month!
