Update July ’20 — Enjoy your stake-cation!
Here we are again! While most are spending the summers inside or on improvised holidays on their balconies, there are still things to feel warm about. What to expect from this update:
Summary of the month
A round-up of everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks, from events to integrations to publications to listings.Staking news
News about staking. Yes, staking.Keeping our ears to the streets
Recapping some recent community feedback and follow-up.Thoughts on DeFi & DeTi (decentralized ticketing)
Although hypes shouldn’t be believed, DeFi is here to stay. Blockchain developer Kasper sheds some light on how we have been finding some very promising business angles.Product Team update
Product Owner Frans Twisk shows us the latest & greatest development results.
Summary of the month
A round-up of everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks, from events to integrations to publications to listings.
Back2Business2Business
While most articles and developments shared in Telegram or the blogs are for general marketing or publicity purposes, there is also a significant chunk of our time and effort that goes into Business to business marketing. Things like mailings to prospective clients and important industry figures. Two more public examples of these efforts were published this month.
#1 GET Protocol CEO Maarten Bloemers was featured in one of Holland’s top Entertainment industry publications, EB Live. In his interview, Maarten lays out the ambitions for the future of the protocol, saying: ‘Holland is like our showcase. Tickets on blockchain are going to be future.’
You can read a segment of the interview in English here.
The full (Dutch) article can be found here.
#2 The international expansion of GET Protocol is covered on Dutch business blog Sprout. It covers the recent moves into the South Korean, Italian and German markets, as well as some context from Maarten.
Conversion 2.0
To further streamline the inflow of new clients, a new page was added to the GUTS website, that allows event organizers to get set up with their ticket sales even quicker!
This addition is another step in streamlining the addition of new clients and events. The easier the better, as this will only bring us closer to becoming the Wordpress of decentralized ticketing!
Let’s not forget about the events!
In July 2020, at least one event per day was ticketed using GET Protocol. Often several more.
While the total number of tickets is not astronomical, there is a very steadily increasing number of events taking place. From livestream shows, to comedy clubs to museums. Below is an overview of some of the artists & locations that have held events on the protocol, just in the last month.
We are continuously having conversations with new artists, managements and venues about what is possible during this unconventional moment in time. It’s clear that a lot is possible with a lot of motivation and a little bit of creativity.
GET Protocol X Chainlink VRF
A big technical integration announcement was announced this month, as we shared our plans to integrate Chainlink VRF into our digital ticketing solution.
After being approached by the Chainlink team and learning about Chainlink VRF, we found a very interesting application that solves an actual problem for ticket buyers, and for ourselves. From the announcement:
GET Protocol and Chainlink have found a way to join forces and further improve the transparency of the user flow for the hundreds of thousands of fans that make use of GET Protocol to buy blockchain-backed smart tickets.
By integrating Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Randomness Function) in GET Protocol’s digital waiting line, ticket buyers for popular events are provided with an honest and transparent chance of buying a ticket.
For popular events where ticket demand exceeds the available supply, the order of the waiting line will be shuffled randomly, as to provide a fair opportunity for all fans to get their hands on a ticket. As the name suggests, this randomness will be verifiable, taking away any possibility for centralized misconduct on the side of the ticketing company, promotor or event organizer. (Something which unfortunately still happens regularly and on a large scale.)
In short, this is an innovation that makes digital ticketing provably more honest!
Check out the full announcement:
We are now working towards a suitable pilot event to apply this integration to. This will of course be accompanied with further co-marketing, to show the world this cool new feature!
Remember the Q2 burn?
While it already seems like ages ago, in the first week of July the Q2 GET burn report was published. A summary:
The GET Protocol processed a total of 164 506 state changes in Q2 of 2020.
48 090 tickets & up sells have been issued and 1943 tickets being resold for a total of 562 events.
To fuel these state changes a total of 60 607 GET has been burned.
Proof of burn Q2: ETHERSCAN BURN PROOF 1 & ETHERSCAN BURN PROOF 2
While the state changes were lower than Q1, due to COVID-19, there is a big silver lining: An all-time record was set in the total amount of events generating state changes; 562 events, an 178% increase to the previous quarter.
This coincides with the noted pivot from less frequent but large event types such as concerts, to recurring event types, such as museums. Since this pivot was only initiated fairly recently, we feel these are very encouraging numbers!
Sidenote: We have published this public repo that anybody can run to verify the reported amount of statechanges.
Meanwhile, the GET utility token was listed on STEX
Another listing occured for GET, on the STEX exchange.
Following this listing, GET was also integrated on Bitcoinmeester (or Bitladon for English users), a respected Dutch trading platform that allows for simple and quick FIAT to crypto trading.
Keeping our ear to the streets
We’ve taken note of some constructive feedback delivered by the community on a few topics, which we’d like to recap and address.
In other words:
Kidding aside, we truly rely on the input from our community for valuable input on all types of matters that might not have occurred to us, or which may seem obvious for us to share, or which we simply get wrong. That’s why we try to be as involving as possible — as the feedback helps us form the road ahead and assess our priorities.
A harshly(!) summarized recap of recent feedback
- There’s a wish for more transparency of what’s happening behind the scenes. This is understandable; while we are immersed in the daily ins & outs of servicing clients, developing & improving features and strategizing for the future, only a slim amount of this information is publicly shared.
While this is normal for an average company, we understand the request, as we might have a more involved community than your average company. - There have been several lingering topics, which were mentioned over the past few months, but remain to be updated.
- The marketability or presentation of the GET token is found by some community members to be less than optimal.
Points of action
- In the next month, we will be releasing a ‘what we’re working on’ page, that will share direct insights into the features and developments that the GET & GUTS teams are — you guessed it — working on.
- A dedicated blockchain team has been formed, outside of the regular development team. This move was made a short while ago, and will provide a heap of improvements to the above points. Kasper will go into this more further down.
- We will do a review of the presentation of the available information about the workings of the protocol and the GET token, to see if there are ways in which we can improve its representation and data.
A humble reminder
While we understand that most people are in crypto for price speculation with a side dish of ‘cool tech’, we remain convinced that our day one approach of developing our protocol and establishing solid business development routes will win out in the long run.
In the end, we are quickly heading towards a reality where actual business is not only validating our efforts, but also fully funding them. No hype can beat that.
Still, there undoubtedly are plenty of short-term potential opportunities for our project & token, which we are keeping an eye out for. If you have suggestions or comments about any of the above, feel free to PM me on Telegram.
Now, who ordered the stake?
Hey, here’s an announcement on staking:
We are happy to confirm that in Q4 of 2020, a GET staking mechanism will be introduced.
This has been alluded to several times before, leading to all sorts of speculation and questioning. We will release all details including timing and rewards in full when they are fleshed out entirely, but we wanted to take away any doubt about staking coming to GET in this year!
Update of the blockchain team — DeFi, independence & more!
By blockchain developer at the GET Protocol Foundation Kasper Keunen.
A lot has been going on on the blockchain front. So much in fact, that we have published by overview of our efforts in a separate blog. Check it out here.
Say hello to the new dedicated blockchain team!
For the last 4 years we have been working with one single development team. This was needed as back-end and front-end where constantly evolving, making it hard to split in more team efficiently.
As a fully operational protocol with paying clients (main stream artists, theaters and museums) we often receive pressing requests for certain features to be built. As our operational momentum is our unique value proposition, our strategy is to build what makes us sell even more tickets.
We might not be listed on Binance/Coinbase but we sure as hell have more active users than 95% of the projects that are listed there. Ensuring we remain able to make this claim does often lead us astray in building less cutting edge features (for good reason).
Regardless of this sound strategy, it became apparent that delivery of our innovative blockchain features was falling behind. In addition, no meaningful progress has been made in open sourcing the protocol — something that is rather ironic for a project claiming the transparency higher ground. Point taken.
The foundation is in, let’s go vertical
We concluded that after 4 years of constant changes to the back-end, we are now at a point where we can assume some ‘primitives’ will remain unchanged.
With that base layer set, we are confident enough to push the throttle.
Reaching this point has allowed us to set up a second development team that will exclusively focus on blockchain features. I (Kasper) will be leading this effort together with Joao and Mark (a new addition to the team)! Welcome :)
The progress we have made in the last couple of weeks has been impressive. The first repo we developed has already been open sourced. I have no doubts that many more will follow!
Product Team update
By Product Owner Frans Twisk.
The product team’s focus this month has been on wrapping up the recurring-events epic (amongst other smaller features), allowing organisers that have a lot of similar events repeatedly to create and manage these better. We’re happy to share we are almost there! Last month we showed you our tickets shops with datepicker browsing and our global sales report. This month we share our progress on event templates and syncing these:
Event Templates
Templates can be used as a blueprint for your recurring-events: you basically set them up once, and then you generate a whole batch of events, for each day you want to sell tickets. This means you can easily generate a whole year (or month, or week) of events, all sharing the same config, and fill your events list or datepicker.
Even better: when a change needs to be made, like an update of a price or capacity, you can do so in the template and sync these changes to all upcoming events! Basically you can now manage all your recurring events in one single place. Easy yet powerful!
The last puzzle of the piece is automating the creation of events from templates using “the scheduler.” More about that in next month’s blog!
Ticket Wallet design improvements
On a side note: we have also made several design improvements to our ticket-wallets. One to specifically mention is that you can now directly see which tickets you own under the QR-code (instead of tapping on “Tickets” first). Important information such as your seats or entrance to take will appear automatically alongside the tickets this refers to. Coming to an app store near you very soon!
More about GET Protocol
As always, if you have comments, questions or suggestions, please drop in to our active Telegram channel here.
Our Korean Telegram channel can be found here, and the GET Naver page is here.
If you want to know more about what we do, read our whitepaper, visit our website, or join the discussion on the GET Protocol Reddit.
