Technology

Tickets Cloud targets major funding through crypto.tickets ICO

Russian online ticketing platform Tickets Cloud is hoping to raise $23m (£17.4m/€19.5m) through the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of its blockchain-based project crypto.tickets.

Almost 54 million tokens have already been sold since the coin offering began earlier this month.

Nearly 1,000 investors have been drawn to crypto.tickets, with the sale to conclude on Sunday, November 7.

Moscow-based Tickets Cloud will be crypto.tickets’ first internal customer when the currency launches in the second quarter of 2018.

Tickets Cloud believes that blockchain will allow crypto.tickets to become a universal decentralised ticketing platform open to all market players. Crypto.tickets is not, the company said, intended to compete with other ticketing platforms, but will instead let any ticketing system and its customers benefit from the advantages of the blockchain.

Speaking to the Coinfox website, Tickets Cloud founder and chief executive Egor Egerev explained why crypto.tickets is different to rival blockchain services.

He said: “We know of about seven or eight projects around the world that are trying to use blockchain for the ticket market; almost all these companies are trying to create a new ticket service using a common registry.

“We are proposing a concept that will, in the future, allow decentralised organisation and a fully distributed asset. Of course, when an ecosystem is first created our company will have the main role because we create the protocol, we get feedback from the market, we implement the whole scheme. But in the future, the system will become increasingly self-governing.”