Climbing to Terrapin
Let me know if this sounds familiar: Your favorite band announced that they’re hitting the road soon and playing a concert in your town. You set multiple alarms reminding you of when tickets go on sale.
Five minutes before tickets go on sale, you sit in the virtual waiting room waiting for your turn to buy a ticket.
And….they’re gone.
What?
They’re gone. There are no more tickets. They’ve sold out.
You refresh the page. You check Twitter. Surely the system is just crashing!
Nope. They’re gone. All bought up. And where’d they go? StubHub, TicketsNow, SeatGeek, eBay, Craigslist. They’re online and you can buy them, but it’s going to cost you a hundred bucks more than what you would have paid five minutes ago. And even then, you could get stuck with a ticket that has already been scanned by the time you get to the door.
There is something wrong with this system.
The internet made buying tickets easier for average people. No longer do we have to run down to the box office during our lunch break and wait in line to get tickets, or send in money orders to fan clubs and wait weeks for tickets to come in the mail. All we have to do is go online and plug in our credit card information. That’s it.
Unfortunately, people have realized that they can buy tickets to events in high demand, open up another tab, post them on the secondary market, and make money off people who actually want to go to the show. Again, there is something wrong with this system.
And that’s why we are creating Terrapin Ticketing.
Terrapin Ticketing is a secure, frictionless ticketing marketplace that allows artists, venues, and promoters to sell tickets to fans with no scalping and no counterfeits.
Terrapin issues what we are calling “smart tickets” using a blockchain technology called Ethereum. Each smart ticket issued through Terrapin is a unique digital asset that exists on the Ethereum blockchain and has its owner and transaction history information embedded into it. Every time a ticket is transferred to a new owner, it records the price and generates a new barcode to grant access to the show, preventing scalpers and counterfeiters from making money off fans trying to see their favorite artists.
Sounds good, right? We think so too.
No longer do we have to pay more to see the bands we love. No longer do we have to fear getting to a show and watching our friends go in while we scramble outside trying to find an extra ticket because ours was fake.
This is ticketing the way it should be.
We have a primary market beta running on the Ropsten Testnet and are building out Terrapin’s secondary market capabilities right now.
Now that you know what we’re building, we’d like to introduce ourselves:
Terrapin Ticketing is being developed in Cincinnati, OH by Kevin Mulcrone & Michael Reeder and designed by Dan Kelly in Omaha, NE. We are technologists, entrepreneurs, and live music fans that are on a mission to improve the experience that happens before getting into the events we love.
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Secondary market ticket sales exploit artists at the expense of their loyal fans. If you’re a promoter, venue, or artist who puts on live events and wants your fans, patrons, and yourself are taken care of, we’d love to talk about how we can help you.
Blockchain technology has proven to be a disruptive force across multiple sectors of the economy with the potential for returns for early adopters. If you are interested in investing in the future of live event ticketing, shoot me a note at Kevin@TerrapinTicketing.com.
