GET Update February ’21 — It’s about time!
NFT Ticket minting, increased trading action, new hires and much more.
It’s blog time! This was a short, four-week-exactly month, which has flown by. Don’t worry, we are nowhere near short on things to talk about. (Now and in the upcoming weeks.)
This blog will focus on the following topics:
Moving up in the world
A couple examples of why the GET community rules.Event updates
All sorts of new events & event types!Releasing the NFT Kraken
The ins & outs of our NFT ticketing approach.New devs on the block
Say hello to our latest hires, Alena and Marcin.
Let’s dive in!
Moving up in the world
This past month has been especially noteworthy as we’ve seen a healthy rise of interest in terms of trading activity around the GET token.
While long overdue if you ask us, and just a fraction of the potential recognition, it has been encouraging to see a rise in trading activity and interest.
It’s not a stretch to link this growing level of eyeballs and trading volume to the constant community efforts that we have been seeing from a variety of angles.
Let’s briefly highlight a few, shall we? There’s this blog from community member Clive:
Then there’s this blog from Adnan, in January, that highlights quite clearly the GET approach to NFT ticketing and the benefits it delivers:
There are countless other examples, along with some beyond excellent Reddit threads, and Twitter convo’s. (We’ve even come across the odd 4Chan thread..)
We feel lucky to have this level of community involvement and appreciate it greatly. It’s motivating us to keep up the work and make sure there is plenty of shareable news ahead — which there is.
Event updates
Meanwhile the team is still tirelessly working away and signing new deals. This continuous addition of clients is also beginning to culminate in higher ticket sales and ticket shops seeing the light of day.
We’ve got a variety of GET-fuelled events coming up in the near future that are worth sharing:
GUTS Tickets has landed its first UK festival, in the shape of Wellnergy; a wellness-focussed ‘Theme Park’ in Oxfordshire. This represents a double trouble of ‘new’, as it is both a new country and a new industry as a whole.
Comedian Micha Wertheim has been touring through empty theaters in The Netherlands with his livestreamed show ‘Niemand anders’ (‘Nobody else’).
The show has pulled thousands of viewers and gotten rave reviews:
Singer Jack Poels of the is doing a livestream to celebrate the release of his solo album. This will take place in
A second edition of ‘Schuld of Onschuld’ (Guilt or innocence) is in the works and ticket sales have started. This virtual court case allows viewers to follow along every day as the case, played by actors, progresses, ultimately ending in a verdict from the jury at home.
DI-RECT is back with another livestream — the guys continuously kick things up another notch, and they have likely found a new way to do so with their next show, which will take place in the Omniversum movie theater. No doubt will this be another one for the books.
The band already tweeted their excitement about having sold over 4000 tickets — this was already a little while ago, so let’s see if we can set a new DI-RECT record!
We’ve also come across an entirely new use case; the organisation MyPodium, is facilitating the distribution of internal corporate communications video, using a livestream from the GUTS ticket wallet.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all…
Another noteworthy show coming up is the next livestream show performed at the legendary Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
This time the piano playing brothers Lucas & Arthur Jussen will be performing pieces from their new album for virtual viewers.
Other quick mentionables
You can now track all social stats for GET Protocol on LunarCRUSH. Here you can find statistics that chart social activity and chatter, as well as other interesting datapoints.
The search for an extra marketeer is coming close to completion, we hope to share good news on that front in a matter of days.
In keeping up with the times, an impromptu GET Clubhouse session was organized this past month, as a try-out for direct communication with the community (and to stay hyperrelevant of course). Now that we have a feel for it, we’ll look into a way to do it again.
Introducing NFT Ticketing
It’s no secret that NFT technology is hotter than Satan’s mistress right now, and your friendly blockchain ticketing project just happens to be on the brink of introducing a new usecase to the world.
If you need a refresher on NFT tech and what our getNFTs entail:
The best part is that we don’t really need to explain it anymore, just ask the Commercial & Partnership lead over at Spotify:
Thankfully, the concept of NFTs is not nearly as vague or exotic in the music industry as you might think. (And I’m not just talking about Soulja Boy’s recent dabbling.)
The sale and distribution of artist-created NFTs to fans or collectors are already fully taking place, and will only see a sharp rise for the time to come.
Next week, we are minting 120,000 NFT tickets on Binance Smart Chain.
These are the currently outstanding (sold) tickets for events that have yet to take place. This event will also be marketed widely.
From here on out, every ticket issued by the protocol is an NFT. Over the course of the next few months, we will be advancing our NFT ticketing approach, and further claim the title as the leading NFT ticketing project.
Following the start of our NFT ticketing, our community developer extraordinaire Deofex did not waste any time and got to building a Telegram bot that registers new $GET fuelled events. So if you want to stay ahead of the curve and know about all the events on the moment they are published:
Let’s dive into the specifics a bit more — and who better to ask than ‘Mr Nitty Gritty’: Kasper!
Blockchain update — Release the Kraken
By blockchain developer at the GET Protocol Foundation Kasper Keunen.
Overview of covered subjects
- Flusher is live!
- Managing ticket transparency & user privacy
- getScan API overview
- Smart contract update — upgradability!
Releasing the NFT Kraken
After a full year of focusing on testing locally the first getNFT mints have finally hit the public ledger over the last weeks. Over the last 72 hours more than 35 000+ getNFTs have been minted by GETs ‘playground’ runner.
This runner is only the mocking the back-filling of 120 000 backlogged tickets in our system. The actual back-filling of the tickets will be done if the mocked back-filling is completed.
Isn’t minting easy?
It is. However it isn’t the mint that we are testing here. The process of minting and back-filling involves far more complex actions as only the minting transaction. Before a mint transaction is sent to the getNFT contract on-chain a lot has happend in the backend of both the ticketeer as well in GETs servers running the getEngine and getCustody. It is these processes that require attention and monitoring. The diagram below gives a rough overview of what is going on behind the scenes.
Better safe than sorry
The minting process requires several database writes and callbacks to databases of our ticketeer integrators. As the production databases serve thousands of people on a daily basis we need to be certain flusher doesn’t disturb stability of these systems. Due to this we need to be very certain that our back-log mints and data-writes do not slow down or cause unexpected errors. So for no issues have been observed — steady as she goes!
Next week we’ll start the back-filling the backlogged tickets using the live systems. This will cause the registration of more than 120 000 tickets and 200+ events!
getNFT blockchain privacy
When observing the getNFT ownership one might notice that each wallet at most owns 1 getNFT. This isn’t because all the ticket holders don’t have any friends or because they are overly compliant to covid laws. In the getNFT system each ticket lives on its own fresh wallet.
To ensure privacy getNFT does not recycle wallet addresses — ever. Meaning: 1 ticket — 1 owner — 1 wallet. Always.
If a user buys 5 tickets, these will be registered to 5 wallet addresses with 1 getNFTs each . Even though these wallets ‘belong to each other’ as they are seeded from a HD wallet — for an outsider observing the blockchain this connection can’t be made (mathematically impossible to do so).
This means that for an outsider it is impossible to identify a user based on the amount of tickets owned — as this can be an identifying factor (one of many). No data is leaked — at all, at any times. There is no way a person can be DOXed — even if external data is included (like Facebook attendance data).
Privacy first
Privacy is a serious matter. The fact that with a blockchain all records are public domain and cannot be deleted on request makes it even more persistent. For example we would be technically unable to comply with a GDPR right to be forgotten request without lobbying for an Ethereum hardfork.
Transparency as a service — getScanner API
In the previous blog I shared some details on how anybody (with knowledge of blockchain explorers) is able to query the getNFT smart contract to get to know more about a certain event or particular tickets. Surely copying hashes in a clunky smart contract interfaces isn’t how we envision the future of ticketing to be experienced.
Our growing blockchain team is working on a kick-ass ticket explorer. However, we do not want us to be the only ones serving up the blockchain data. One of the reasons the blockchain space is so vibrant and innovation is so fast paces — is due to the fact that all data and tools are accessible for anyone, anywhere without consent. Allowing anybody to build on the GET Protocol is one of our key objectives. Open sourcing the code base is only part of the solution. Ensuring that the ticket/NFT data is easily queried is maybe even more pressing.
Those wanting to use our getNFT assets or registered event data in their own app or site should not have to study the Solidity ABIs. Requesting data about a ticket should be as easy as doing an API call. This is why we are offering an (open sourced) node repo called getScan. The diagram shows the pivotal role these nodes will play in tying everything together.
Some example queries:
We expect to publish the full documentation for using the getScan API next week!
V4 of getNFT contracts
A key point of using a blockchain as data-storage mechanism is that the data is immutably registered. No do-overs, no edits, no censorship. This ‘blockchain feat’ is pivotal in solving the inefficiencies in the ticketing sector — as these are caused fundamentally by distrust. This immutability does pose challenges from the continues development side of things.
Upgrading the immutable
With blockchain data written is immutably stored. Data can technically be deleted, but it will remain possible to lookup what its previous state was. The code writing the data is also persistent(by default). As GET is constantly improving and adding new features this immutability poses a challenge if one wants to incrementally improvement and add features.
When using the default smart contract deployment process, every change to smart contract code would result in a completely new smart contract address for getNFTs. Causing a wild growth in getNFT contracts. Surely this isn’t viable — luckily there are several Solidity design patterns that allow developers to upgrade contracts while keeping persistent storage.
After a long period of research and testing we completed a up-gradable version of our getNFT Factory contract as well as the event metadata contracts. A diagram showing the architecture of our approach is shown below.
Check out the new contracts for yourself on our Github!
Godspeed y’all.
Introducing two new devs
The development team has been lucky enough to add two newcomers this month! Let’s meet them.
Could you introduce yourself?
Hi! I’m Alena. I was born and raised in Siberia, Russia. There I got my master degree in Linguistics. Beside my main job as an English teacher, I also tried myself as a radio host, stage director and language school manager. And here in the Netherlands I decided to switch not only my “home” but also my career. Last year I finished an intensive full stack academy and here I am, at GUTS!
What is your job description here?
I’m a Frontend Developer. Basically I’m responsible for implementing all product owner’s bold ideas in real life. I’m here to find the best possible solution and make it real.
How have your first weeks been?
Honestly it was crazy time: meeting so many new people (off and online), getting to know the product and the code. And on top of it all snowstorm on my first day here! Sometimes I felt overwhelmed but always truly happy. It was really nice to have this possibility to meet everyone from GUTS and GET and smoothly dived into an actual job.
Which challenges or achievements do you look forward to tackling in your time here?
Because it’s my first time as a frontend developer every day is kind of a challenge. I’m happy to kick off my career at GUTS where I have the possibility to grow and flourish as a developer, learn from the team and work on such a cool and progressive project!
What do you like to do in your time off?
I love music! Also I’m a big fan of animated series, always glad to watch a good movie. Last time I was at the cinema, I watched Jojo Rabbit and this film was brilliant!
Before corona times I enjoyed travelling, going to concerts and museums. I’ve already made a quite long list of what I want to try to do for the first time and where I want to go in the post-covid era.
How do you see the future of digital ticketing?
It’s gonna be extremely fast, easy, transparent and fair for all users, artists and everyone who is connected to it. It seems to me that GET/GUTS is going ahead of its time and a real revolution is coming in digital ticketing. I’m proud to be a part of such an interesting project.
Hi there! Could you introduce yourself?
Hey, my name is Marcin. I am a dad, a photographer and at GET Protocol and GUTS I am a software developer.
How have your first weeks been?
It has been great! The team is diverse and full of passionate individuals. I felt welcome and experienced a lot of support from day one. Also my first day at work happened to be in the middle of a snowstorm, so getting to the office was an achievement in itself!
Which challenges or achievements do you look forward to tackling in your time here?
The first challenge is naturally to dive into the code and learn its ins and outs. Our product is feature-rich so there is a lot to learn . Beside that I am very excited to join the team at the time when there is a new product on the drawing board. For me personally means whole new space to grow as a developer and be part of something important.
What do you like to do in your time off?
I enjoy spending time with my son, playing games together or cycling. I love to get into my campervan and get out with my love into the unknown. I charge my batteries at festivals and concerts. This, by the way was a big draw for me to join the team and to help disrupt this rotten event and ticketing industry.
I am also a photographer so you might find me in the alternative places around the city with my camera . When I am on my own I will probably read or watch something about the space exploration, technology or Star Wars related. Or watch Aliens for the 1000th time.
How do you see the future of digital ticketing?
The future is transparent, fair and accountable. The things that current ticketing solutions do not offer. Which is very fortunate, as GET Protocol in its concept tackles all these aspects, but also offers a ready-made solution.
So yeah, I think we are here to chew bubblegum and kick some asses. Oh, and we are all out of bubblegum.
We’ll be back next month with another update that will likely involve lots of new events, tokenomics info and maaaybe some other cool developments we’re working on. See you then!
More about GET Protocol
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