Ticketing platform made to serve events of all shapes and sizes
Events come in all shapes and sizes, and each of those have different approach and needs regarding ticketing.
The most important things for large scale concerts and sports games is to ensure that the system won’t slow down during activity peaks when the sale goes off and everyone rushes to get the best deal. This high activity oftentimes is caused by ticket scalping bots that are set up to buy as many tickets as possible before real humans do so to later sell the tickets on the secondary market with super high markups. And here we get to two other major concerns: ticket scalping and secondary market. Ticket scalping causes headaches for event organizers and attendees alike. The former loses revenue and gains a bad reputation, and the later must pay unreasonably high price for the event. This then consequentially leads to secondary market opportunities — those scalpers sit in golden thrones waiting for the big bucks to roll in as they sell bot-bought tickets online, and sometimes they would even sell fake tickets or the same ticket to several people. I mean, come on, like you didn’t cause enough problem already man. This isn’t fair, it isn’t safe and all in all it’s just simply ridiculous.
We at Tixico are big music and sports fans ourselves. We care about it so much, that our CEO Normunds even is the founder of Austras balva, the Latvian equivalent of Mercury Prize in the UK. And this is actually what got us thinking and deciding that we need a solution that would fix all these problems at once.
Tixico offers a ticketing platform for efficient and scalable primary ticketing market — the system scales seamlessly so even during the highest activity people wouldn’t get annoyed. It also solves the issue with the bots. How? Easy does it! When purchasing a ticket, the user buys a virtual asset that represents the ticket on the blockchain. This has two benefits. First of all, this type of ticket is protected by the blockchain mechanism, which ensures the continuity of information, data immutability and eliminates duplicates; these two properties provide a higher level of protection against ticket counterfeiting. Here we get to the secondary market as well — since the tickets are distributed via the blockchain we can provide the users and organizers with a safe, counterfeit-free secondary market that benefits both sides. The main advantage for the organizer is the fact that they can generate additional income from each sale of the ticket on a secondary market. This can be done because the ticket is exchanged on the blockchain and thus always contains information about the event and its creator. During an exchange, a small portion of the payment can be sent directly to the organizer. The organizer can also set up preferences for the tickets sold in the secondary market. For the end user, the advantage is that all tickets available on this secondary market are legitimate, since the ticket asset cannot be falsified. After a successful purchase of the ticket, the buyer receives it and the seller gets the corresponding amount, minus the organizer’s fee, which is taken from the organizer’s resale preferences. Consequently, there are two winners (the seller and the organizer) from the sale of a ticket, but the ticket now belongs only to one of them (the buyer). To keep tickets on the second-hand market from selling out and to increase the reseller and organizer profits they can also be auctioned.
Alright, the biggest events we got covered. But what about those smaller ones? Like, FuckUp Nights Riga, one of our partners? People stand in lines to get to the event but the capacity doesn’t exceed 200 attendees. There is no need of scalable ticketing system nor the secondary market plays such an important role. But the problem is different. When the idea was born to organize the event in Latvia, the organizers had no idea whether or not people will be willing to listen to other people’s failures (ok, lets face it — everyone loves to hear how others messed up), so they decided to make the first event entrance free to test the audience. Organizers funded the venue and all other costs out of their own pockets just to experience that the interest from attendees exceeded the room capacity for staggering 35 times!
Why they didn’t choose a bigger venue then? Well, they were super enthusiastic about the idea but too broke to afford it. What happened was that so many people missed the chance to attend the event, organizers missed the potential revenue. But how on earth they could have know beforehand that it would turn out this way? Booking huge venue with the money you don’t have to see 7 people arriving would be too heart (and bank) breaking, having free list to sign up wouldn’t work as most people sign up just because but don’t show up and so on and so forth. But here comes some good news, folks! Tixico has a solution for this as well. One of the strongest features of the Tixico platform will be the crowdfunding functionality. This allows for smaller or local events to attract much-needed funds before announcing the event to the public. It allows organizers to gain traction to their events and validate their assumptions before proceeding to plan. To reduce the risks for our users we will require the organizers to provide additional identification and a deposit to make sure the event is legitimate. In return for funding events, the users can be granted early access to the ticket sales or they can participate in profit sharing with the organizers. The early access options give users the opportunity to buy valuable tickets in advance. All of this means that tickets can later be used to attend the event with friends. Or they can use the tickets to recoup money by reselling some or all of them. The profit sharing provides everyone in the world with the opportunity to increase their capital by funding attractive events around the globe.
The crowdfunding functionality for events is what separates us from our competitors. However, it is not our only advantage. After long discussions with our partners from the event industry, we saw that blockchain ticketing has drawbacks that make it less appealing for adoption. One of these drawbacks is the lack of physical or paper tickets. We plan to provide various entry flows. One of these flows is a hybrid solution for both physical tickets next to blockchain tickets. This way, we can increase the adaptability of the technology. To minimize the counterfeit risk for this entrance flow we burn the corresponding virtual asset on the blockchain and apply protection from copying. But that’s a story for another time…
So here we are — fixing the ticketing market one ticket at the time!
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