GET Update April ’21 — The end of the beginning
We’re presenting a huge new NFT tool, major insights about the future of the protocol and a bunch of whispers from around the office…
Here’s what we have for you this time:
Running through the month’s highlights
It’s crazy what you can fit into a month.New hires, new job openings
Introducing yet two new team members again, and looking for many more.Reflecting on five years of innovative ticketing
Celebrating 5 years of GUTS Tickets, our founding fathers share their thoughts, experience and expectations.Proudly presenting the ticket explorer
Giving you a sneak peak at the GET NFT Ticket explorer.Ticketing truth bomb
Insight into the ticketing industryIntroducing Flockey
The latest GET white-labeler has got big plans.
Catching up on this month’s highlights
It’s crazy what you can fit into a month.
The GET utility token was listed on Bittrex Global, an event that allows those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with Uniswap to acquire GET from either USDT/GET or BTC/GET pairs.
Full info + links can be found in the announcement blog:
Decentralized finance testing has begun! We are very happy to say that we have begun testing our decentralized event financing flow. This marks the beginning of a period of ‘kicking the tires’ of everything we have thought up, and battle-testing our assumption in a sequence of increasingly complex situations and variables.
One such instance is the mysteriously named FOMO Friday — An internal testing event, for which some over-achieving community members managed to buy tickets. (Thanks for the money, we’ll pay you back in drinks at the next meetup!)
From some office whispers, it’s become obvious that we will not have to pitch this feature very hard. On the contrary: interesting prospects are showing up on our doorstep. More hashes, graphs and Balancer pools will be shared in the time to come.
And of course the Q1 token burn came in hot. As is custom after every finalized quarter, the burnback report for Q1 2021 was published this month. Even though many live events were still facing very limiting restrictions, the protocol managed to facilitate a nice scorching of GET tokens.
Top-level summary:
The GET Protocol processed a total of 216 163 state changes in Q1 of 2021.
41 926 tickets & up sells have been issued and 122 tickets have been resold for a total of 251 events.
To fuel these state changes a total of 7336 GET has been burned. Worth $57 220 at the moment of burn, $26 801 at the moment of purchase from Uniswap.
Proof of burn Q1: Etherscan tx.
Check out the full report here:
Meanwhile this month has seen a decent number of ticket state changes in its own right, with many days registering multiple thousands, as can be tracked on the community-ran datasite.
It’s probably not entirely a coincidence that live-streamers extraordinaire are giving another performance on May 1st. (Tomorrow at the time of publication.)
You can still get your tickets, starting as low as €2, from the ticketshop.
We’re happy to introduce our new FAQ which can be used by the community to answer any questions that may pop up regarding the project. Whether you’re after an answer to your own question, or want to help a community member with any questions they may have, the FAQ will come in handy!
You can access the FAQ via the link below or visit: https://faq.get-protocol.io
The FAQ is split into several sections:
- Popular Questions
- General FAQ
- The GET Token FAQ
- Implementing The Protocol For Ticketing FAQ
- The GET Buyback FAQ
If you’re looking to reference a specific question and answer, then use the anchor icon next to the question title which will allow you to copy and paste the URL.
Don’t see your question or perhaps have an answer that we haven’t covered in the FAQ? Feel free to submit your question/answer to us via this Google Form.
We’ve also launched our media kit, providing a comprehensive overlook of GET Protocol and acts as a gateway for further resources and media assets that anyone interested in the project may need.
The media kit and media assets can be accessed via this Google Drive Link.
We want to involve the community as much as possible and give the tools necessary to distribute information about GET Protocol, we hope having access to the media kit will come in handy for achieving this goal!
More hires, more job openings
The growth spurt continues.
As mentioned last month, we are anticipating a significant uptick in business and are therefore aggressively growing our team at the moment. Our ambition is to double the team (from roughly 30 to 60 employees), which means we will be introducing more and more team members to you over the months to come.
This month, like last, we’re name-dropping two new team members:
Bas Jaburg is our latest UX designer and Stijn Veken is a new Software Engineer for the team. (Well, to be fair, Stijn is not brand spanking new anymore; he’s already been with us a couple months but never got his well-deserved shout out until now.
To make that up to him, we’ll also happily share that Stijn was named one of the 500 most ambitious young IT talents by T500. Well done!
Who’s next? You?
A possibly unsurprising result of our expansion plans is the fact that we have some job openings available!
There are always positions open, for example we are actively looking for a kick-ass DevOps engineer to join the team. If you think you know the perfect match, we’re willing to send 250 $GET your way for the golden tip.
Check out the other current job listings here:
Regardless of this list, if you feel like you have certain skills or experience to bring to the table, we are happy to hear you out. Whether you’re a DeFi god, have outrageously good support skills, or have the industry connections that would make Jordan Belfort jealous, hit us up.
Reflecting on 5 years of innovative ticketing
This month marks the 5-year existence of GUTS Tickets and our innovative ticketing mission. To commemorate the occasion, we thought we’d check in with our founding fathers, to get their insights on the journey thus far and what they see for the future that lies ahead.
Tom, CCO
How has the journey been for you thus far?
Bumpy, intense and very adventurous. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. When we started I didn’t have a big network in the entertainment industry, but after 5 years, it feels awesome to be in the middle of it.
The people in this industry are pleasant to work with, but getting your foot in the door and building a name in this industry isn’t easy. Especially for ticketing; where it’s really based on trust and offering a stable system with a minimum of basic features. For event organizers, ticketing is the backbone of their events. When an event is going on sale, they want to work with a trustworthy party that knows what they are doing.
We are very happy with our current client base, they are a reference for us and help us to grow further. Also our system has developed over the years into one that provides functionalities that match (and exceed) the best systems in the market.
Have things mostly gone as planned?
No, in fact this whole journey wasn’t planned at all — the first 5 years have become fantastic chapters of an increasingly awesome book. We entered this industry with a lack of experience, background and network. If we did our homework 5 years ago we would have probably come to the conclusion that this ticketing market was too crowded with all kinds of strong competitors with long-lasting ticketing contracts. (Some contracts last 5 to 10 years before you even can do a pitch!) Nevertheless, over the past 5 years, we have managed to build a name in the industry with our ambassadors and the community that equals honest ticketing and innovation.
What are you most proud of?
The team! We have an awesome and diverse team of enthusiastic people that love making a difference in the ticketing space.
What are you most looking forward to over the next 5 years?
Growing GUTS tickets in the Netherlands together with awesome customers that experience the best and latest technology and growing GET with hundreds of white-label customers in every corner of the world. I’m incredibly energised to do this, because we have a product that is truly next level and brings huge benefits to event organizers worldwide.
Frans, Product Owner
It’s been a hell of a ride. I never expected we would be where we are today. Especially not during the first 2 years where we found so much resistance from the market: due to politics and people trying to maintain the status-quo in the remarkable world of ticketing. We had a vision, but we had no idea what we got outselves into…
Fast forwarding to now: our initial products are mature, our team is still expanding, new ticketeers are lining up and it is all unfolding towards our initial vision (all in these pandemic times!). We’ve had our bumps in the road, we made mistakes (and pretty sure more will follow), we still need to overcome many challenges, but I am confident the future of tickets is running on GET Protocol.
I am looking forward to taking our current products and the team to the next level, which, in a nutshell, means scaling. Everything. But I am even more excited to design & develop new products on top of the current protocol: DeFi, Ticket Explorer, integrations with competitors who finally see the light, and all those other secret projects written on the back of a “bierviltje”. There is still much to be done and I cannot wait to spend the next 5 years on it.
Ivo, CTO
Frans and I started in 2016 as the first two developers, doing UX, FE, BE, dev ops and blockchain all by ourselves, preparing for our first real sale / show later that year. We had to invent everything from scratch which allowed us to move very fast, but also to cut some corners.
A dashboard with no real backend (just mocked data) to convince people of our product, rotating QR codes (that actually rotated because of an increasing counter), a simple blockchain protocol (which wasn’t too dissimilar from what would later be labeled NFT’s, but eventually also hopelessly clogged up our system during a sale), a primitive waiting line implementation (called “Constipation”, that we actually repurposed a year later for the ICO), a simple scan app built in half a day by an applicant on his try-out day.
Those days are long gone. We can’t cut corners anymore or get away with prototypes. We have real users, both as ticket holders and as event organizers and artists.
From “fake it till you make” it we went to “underpromise, overdeliver.”
And with our white-label partners around the world our next challenge will be to make sure this works globally. With payments, currencies, payouts, translations, but also making sure we can do unexpected big sales efficiently and locally while still keeping a transparent, unified and consistent scalable platform.
Maarten, CEO
This month marks the five year anniversary of our organisation. ‘The end of the beginning.’ It’s been a wild ride so far and we have zero plans of calming down. I’m not the kind of person to ponder long about things in the past; I’m awfully grateful and proud of the things we’ve achieved. On to the next.
I’d rather give some more insight on where we are and where we’re going.
GUTS’ mission:
To demonstrate the added value of truly digital tickets registered on blockchain.GET Protocol’s mission:
To become the worldwide (open source) plug-in blockchain data standard for digital rights to enter an event.
We can only achieve these missions by setting realistic goals and battle-testing everything we do. There is no use in creating a protocol and expecting everyone to use it because it’s supposedly good. We need to prove it.
Our technical- and business development is clustered in phases:
SHOP WINDOW (GUTS); shows everybody what is possible with actual digital tickets.
LINGCHI (GET WHITE-LABEL); local team with own clients and support exploit a GUTS copy. No technical knowledge needed.
SEGMENTS (GUTS); Divide the one size fits all GUTS product into specifically designed products per vertical (day trips, sports, live music, etc ..) All available for new GET White-labels of course.
DIGITAL TWIN; existing primary sellers use GET Protocol’ Non Fungible Tickets infrastructure as an add on / plugin on their existing system(s).
OPEN SOURCE; DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) with open source code.; if and when we accumulate enough network value with the above business models we’ll open source all of the above conversely, annul the foundation and let GET holders decide on the governance and development of the GET Protocol.
The main advantage of executing the strategy in the clustered phases above is the removal of onboarding friction for all potential partners; from a single artist to an existing ticketing behemoth.
5 years marks the end of the beginning. We’ve successfully completed the first phases for GUTS and GET and we’re in better shape than ever. Our community plays a pivotal role in our execution and we thank you for everything you’ve done so far. On to the next 5 years.
Proudly presenting the GET NFT Ticket Explorer
As we perhaps hinted at loosely in our r/cryptocurrency AMA this past month; the much awaited ticket explorer is in its final stages of creation. While we are still dotting a couple i’s and crossing a few t’s, we couldn’t wait any longer with sharing what is about to be released.
Obvious disclaimer: The explorer is not live yet and the content is subject to change from what you are seeing here.
Ticket explorer?
We like cool tech, such as blockchain and NFTs, but we really like making it understandable, accessible and beneficial to the masses, who might not be so tech-savvy.
That’s why we are excited about bringing the ticket explorer to life, which is going to be an important bridge between the wonderful world of NFTs and the average event attendee.
We’ll give a sneak peek of a couple designs, and leave the rest for the full release in a few weeks.
Homepage
Here visitors can enter their NFT index, wallet address or transaction hash to bring up specific tickets or wallets.
We plan to release the first version of the Ticket Explorer in the upcoming month, accompanied with a blogpost with all the ins and outs. It is a new product and its release will be like everything we build: an initial MVP. This means that in the following months we will be enriching it with more features & data, also based on YOUR feedback!
It will also show you a lot of relevant (real-time!) data on live ticket state changes, both from that day and the past. (Even more than shown in this image!)
Ticket Lifecycle
When you’ve entered your NFT index (or someone else’s for that matter), you will be able to track its lifecycle, showing the exact moment all previous transactions took place, and the price that was paid for the ticket. It will also show which ticketeer issued the NFT in the first place.
Here you can verify the validity of your ticket, ensure that a fair price was paid and check out its journey on the good ol’ blockchain.
A look at some of the different states that a ticket can have:
- Sold — when a ticket is first sold in the primary market.
- Resold — when the ticket is sold on the secondary market.
- Scanned — when the ticket is validated at the event.
- Invalidated — when an event is cancelled, or the ticket needs to be taken out of rotation for another reason, they will be invalidated. If this occurs, it is shown.
- Claimed — a novel feature, which is going to be released upon the second iteration of the explorer.
Speaking of claiming…
Here’s a recent concept of the interface where you can view your claimed NFT tickets.
Here, you can see all the tickets of previous event, right where they need to be. (On a digitised version of a refrigerator. An hommage to the olden days.)
From Product Owner Frans:
We plan to release the first version of the Ticket Explorer in the upcoming month, accompanied with a blogpost with all the ins and outs.
It is a completely new product and its release will be like everything we build: an initial MVP. This means that in the following months we will be enriching it with more features & data, also based on the YOUR feedback!
Features that will be added in the next iterations:
- Directly opening the Ticket Explorer with state-changes of the tickets you own, straight from the (mobile) app.
- Claiming your Ticket NFT’s in the mobile app.
- Viewing your claimed NFT’s in the explorer (aka the fridge).
- Much much more.
Ticketing truth bomb
While we’re evaluating and assessing, it might also be worth sharing some occasional insights about the ticketing industry, which we’ve picked up over the years.
They might help shape your understanding of the market we operate in and illustrate the (future) positioning of GET within it. Starting off with this tweet on the left.
Ticketing companies have traditionally functioned as scapegoats for artists, promoters and others behind the scene.
Not being the bad guy in a situation has a lot of value, especially if you are making a name and revenue off of a public persona, like an artist or well known organisation. Ticketing companies have over the years found a way to service this need, by agreeing to put the target on their backs and generally ‘being the asshole’ and taking the blame.
This has been a successful business model for a long time, and is only seemingly now beginning to show some cracks, with a heightened level of public and regulatory interest into what goes on behind the scenes. Add to that the arrival of certain innovative methods of decentralisation and you’ve got yourself a stew brewing. A stew that smells like opportunity, friends.
At the risk of repeating ourselves, it’s important to reiterate here that the mission of the foundation is to become an independent global data standard.
Today, we are more confident than ever that we are on the path to achieving this goal.
Watch out, here comes Flockey
There’s a new kid on the block — with big plans.
Flockey, the latest GET white-labeler to be announced is a collaboration been Unlimited Solutions, Forkbeard, EY and GET Protocol.
That’s a team with some experience and connections behind it, which can be seen in the magnitude of the first client that was announced: a little get-together called the Eurovision Song Contest. (Watched by a little more than 182 million people the last time around.)
A promising start, to say the least. Flockey’s innovative and patented technology gives event organisers a way to set up their events with safety in mind for all attendees and crew.
By utilising anonymous proximity monitoring and contact tracing, potential COVID risks can be mitigated and an anonymous notification system gives peace of mind to the organisation and individuals if any potential risk occurs.
This further expands on COVID-proof event capabilities offered using GET Protocol.
To stay up to date on Flockey’s exciting road ahead, give them a follow on Instagram or Linkedin.
In mean time, now is a better time than ever to highlight one of the benefits of the GET white-label ecosystem that thus far has gone under the radar: The connection and potential synergy between white-label integrators.
Flockey is a prime example of added value to this ecosystem. Any white-labeler using GET Protocol can integrate the basic features of Flockey’s COVID monitoring and reporting tools. This interoperability is a crucial element towards an open data standard where every user of GET Protocol provides added network value.
P.S. There are whispers around the office about multiple new white-label integrators having signed on, but let’s not spoil the surprise too much. You will meet them as soon as they are out in the open. (Could be at any given moment, so stay vigilant…)
While you wait, you can venture a guess to our marketeer (and graphics lord!) Colby’s question below. The first reply to this tweet that names the correct country will win 100 GET upon announcement. And give the lad a follow while you’re at it, won’t you?!
And with that we will leave you — for now. We will of course share big news with you the moment it goes live. If you couldn’t tell from reading between the lines, I’ll say it again: We are beyond excited about the future, both for the developments already secured and the ones in progress. Stay tuned!
More about GET Protocol
Feedback
As always, if you have comments, questions or suggestions, please drop in to our active Telegram channel, and be sure to follow us on Twitter.
How to help out
If you are a fan of our system and want to help out, you can do so by leaving a review about GET Protocol user GUTS on Google, the iOS app store or Google Play store.
Where to buy GET
Want to get your hands on some GET tokens? Here’s an easy guide.
Korea
Our Korean Telegram channel can be found here, and our Naver page is here.
Learn more
If you want to know more about what we do, visit our website, or join the discussion on the GET Protocol Reddit.
