The head of a blockchain platform for music distribution believes the technology could be employed to prevent bots from shaping the secondary ticketing market.
Bryce Weiner, founder of the Los Angeles-based Tao Network, said the ticket vending process could be decentralised to a blockchain, in which only a certain number of tickets are made available at a given time.
With each transaction taking a predetermined amount of time to be processed, the pre-eminence of scalpers and the bots they use to buy thousands of tickets within split seconds would be decimated.
“The issue has always been that when 10,000 tickets go on sale, 9,000 of them disappear in the first few seconds because of automated systems,” Weiner told the A Journal of Musical Things website.
“Converting ticket sales to a blockchain would solve that problem from the start simply because there is no way to resolve all 10,000 of those transactions within five seconds.
“It’s possible it will take at least seven-and-a-half minutes with the Tao network to be able to process a block or batch of those transactions, which means there’s still a large number of transactions that are left in the queue.”
Weiner said it would be impossible for scalpers to override the blockchain’s algorithms to buy more tickets at the same time.
“You can’t fake it, you can’t spoof the data,” he said. “Everybody is going to see that you’re a ticket scalper and we’re going to build all these mathematical metrics in order to determine who is and who is not a ticket scalper and then address the problem from where it stands.”
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