The Future of Business: How Open Editions and new Ticketing Systems Are Disrupting Industries

Sébastien Rouxel-An
nexteconomy
Published in
8 min readMar 28, 2023

You can hack your growth by catching trends early on or by engaging your audience using simple and powerful new technologies.
I will show you two entirely novel ways to distribute products: Open Editions and Burn to Redeem. These can be easily used by businesses of any scale.
Combined, they are the most powerful tools available to open new markets, establish your brand, or create amazing customer journeys today.
This article is ChatGPT free 😉

Unique disruptive capacities

In a previous article we discovered that we can design new kinds of supply chains using digital assets.
Before we learn about new disruptive models, let’s remind us of what those digital assets are and do: Consider they behave like unique tickets or IOU to anything.

There is no need to purchase ticketing services from Eventbrite or a similar company. You can create tickets and distribute them in a few clicks:
-Your tickets simply cannot be copied,
-the service cannot be offline,
-you can continue interacting with the audience. Send them a souvenir afterward: you have their addresses.
-you don’t need to know their identities: you can always connect with a ticket owner.

Costs can be extremely low nowadays, and the beauty of it is that you don’t need to be a developer to make it happen.

The leaders in the ticketing industry are all testing their own versions with great success. The first to deploy those solutions successfully will have a disruptive advantage.

Today you can deploy your own tickets but not only.

Open Editions have no limit

A few months ago, a new trend emerged: Open Editions (or OEs). OEs are NFTs that have no supply limit, meaning there is no limit to the number that can be created. You can set any price and sell them for a determined period of time. While OEs are not a new concept, they have gained popularity recently.
Open Editions became popular because they were usually cheap, about 15$ for most.
Using those, artists could be seen and reach a broader audience..

Schmrypto, an artist and thought leader, echos my own opinion in this exemplary thread, he influenced this article in many ways:

A simple tool to engage all your clients

Example: I made an Open Edition for my art.

For about 10 dollars you could get a “ticket” and redeem my future creations, a bit like coupons you can use to buy one of my works.
This impacts my production in many ways, yes I will earn less for my art, but I also distributed 200 of those NFTs, which can cover my production costs. I used manifold.xyz to create it because it is very easy to use, but there are many tools and solutions available.

In the spawn of a few days I sold 207 tickets to ~40 new collectors.

The most important, for small creators, is that it is extremely motivating to grow a collector base. People believed in my art and in me, I should keep creating for them. This token can be resold on marketplaces, but so far only one was listed and priced for over 1 million dollars, it is “probably a joke.

Why is it important for your business? It provides a long-term channel to interact with your customers. The size of your business doesn’t matter, in fact it is even more impactful if you are an established brand.

How you can use it to generate value for all

The Shepherd

The Shepherd is an iconic character for many of my collectors, as the leader of a project I am involved in (Wolf Game). I released it a couple of days after I sold my Redemption ticket.

I keep producing art that people can redeem using the original token, and each time my collectors can decide if they spend their ticket. Some pieces are 1/1 editions, others open editions, and I also offer physical pieces.

My collectors get exclusive access to unique works. I build special, long-lasting, relationships with them.

Collectors could use a “Burn to Redeem” system to get this new token.

Burn to Redeem is an amazing tool for creators and corporations alike.

Burn in the crypto world means that you destroy the token, technically you send it to a “burn address” (you transfer the digital item to a wallet that belongs to nobody, it is locked forever and nobody can access it).

Connect - Send the ticket- Done : you received a new product

What can you do with a burn?

It makes the digital asset act exactly like a ticket, you can use it to use a service or access something once. What’s great is that the ticket can be “stored” on your phone (or a computer, a smartwatch, etc.) and sent or sold to anyone.

Burn to redeem is a bit like exchanging one digital for another. You destroy token A to get token B. For my art they have the ticket and can burn it to get a piece, they need this ticket for any of the pieces.

Example: Nyan Balloon

Chris (https://twitter.com/PRguitarman) is the creator of Nyan Cat, a meme and a major piece of internet history. Most people born between 1985 and 1995 will recognize it.

Nyan Cat

Chris initially created an open edition of the Nyan Red Balloons, they were an old creation dear to the artist, he wanted to share this creation.
He uses the Burn to Redeem mechanism to distribute the other Nyan Ballons.

You could initially buy a red balloon. You could further transform it into a balloon of another color. Each balloon was only available for one day (one at a time).

A gamified art piece

It makes use of game theory principles, will you keep your red balloons or trade them for the orange ones? Will it be rarer/more expensive? Should you wait for the mystery balloon, the last one, that required more balloons to be redeemed?

He distributed over 21 000 balloons, each for a bit over 10$, but the secondary market (reselling) had a volume of 1.8 Million dollars.

This is an individual project, but it reached a very large market, with hundreds of thousands of people getting to know about it and the artist behind Nyan Cat.

Culturally relevant

This is the zeitgeist in art. Photography changed painting, and those mechanisms allow art to be a live experience orchestrated by the artist. This is almost like a performance, a living art, and anybody can participate.

Example: Checks

✅Checkmarks used to be a way to verify an account on twitter, to show the account is notable. It was far from perfect but recently it became more controversial: Those Checkmarks have to be purchased.

Checks is a reflection around the topic of notoriety, the idea that you could buy recognition, but also around the value of scarcity.
The artworks are rows of colorful checkmarks.

The leading principle is that you can burn/combine those “Checks” to create rarer versions of them.

Read this tweet by thread by @sully_finance to discover how this simple concept allowed Jack Butcher to invent a whole new way to make collaborative art.
You have got to love the creativity and the community that grew around it.

On the collector side there is speculation of course, but there is also a sense of community, shared values: people know they are part of a change of paradigm, or of a global cultural reflection at the very least.

A buzzing ecosystem

A huge community of collectors already exists on social media platforms, especially on twitter. The artists are constantly finding new ways to interact.

For example Jack Butcher released another mysterious Open Edition collection, which evolves in parallel to the Checks one. The art is dynamic, the artist can change the art anytime.

The artist build a following. The financial aspect is central, but to be honest the traditional art market relies mainly on this too. The difference is that the artists keep their collectors entertained after the initial sale (and benefit from the secondary market through royalties).

A unique customer experience

Jack Butcher brought a fresh perception of what dynamic art and minimalistic design is, in my opinion the NFT space needed that. Opepen was his second Open Edition collection, which he launched at the same time with checks. As soon as I saw the huge success of Checks, I made a bet: he got something in sleeve about opepen even though he didn’t confirm it.

And it happened, the day he changed the metadata, the floor [secondary market minimum price] went parabolic.
It was profitable for me since I had bought around 37 of them, I made around 10 eth [16 000$], and still hold 3 of them, with 2–3 digit numbers, because I believe in the long term success of Jack Butcher, comparing him to the artblocks type of movement. His communication on twitter has been so active, you can always expect a comment or retweet from him, that what attracts me the most about Jack and his approach to communicate his craft.

Bunya
Pixel Artist x Motion Designer
gallery

A border-less crowd market for companies

Yes, it is great for small artists, but the possibilities are endless for companies.

We have seen countless companies launching their own collections ( Gucci, Samsung, Porsche…). But the tools and the principles presented above are not truly utilized yet, they will become new standards, and they will be the norm in many industries.
You can build new disruptive models using those and be a leader of the Web3 mass adoption.

I believe SMEs are the ones with the highest chance to succeed in this market. They are flexible enough to adapt quickly and can offer a lot to consumers.

The growth will come from the utility: there is money to be made in the current NFT market but your product doesn’t have to be about investment.

Build for your consumers, create solutions that will bring joy and empower them. That is what Open Edition and Redemption Tokens enables, now it is up to you to reinvent Customer Relationships.

In future articles I will present the tools available on the market, and I will also show you the unique NFTs I invented. This is just the beginning.
Follow me on twitter for more : @TechnologyNF

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