Aventus share their insights on how Blockchain can help ticketing events:
Aventus is examining what an open ticketing standard may mean, how Blockchain can facilitate an open shared standard and what the benefits of a standard can be to the event ticketing industry. Firstly some of the challenges that have occured in the event ticketing sector today must be examined.
Event Lifecycle
The event lifecycle is complex with many entities, often siloed, involved from sale to redemption of the ticket. This makes it hard for rights holders and entities with rights to some or all of the revenue from the sale of tickets to retain oversight, and control where applicable, over the tickets. Even vertically integrated organisations can lose control and oversight as tickets, even supposedly secure digital tickets, can leak out of a centralised system.
We believe that two key challenges impact ticketing the most, and both can be addressed using blockchain:
- It is common for the entity responsible for an event to be different to the entity that is responsible for selling tickets to the event resulting challenges for both the decision making and data holding parties. In addition third parties can create services around tickets which do not benefit the rights holder (e.g. resale marketplaces)
- Innovation around tickets is constrained to initiatives within silos, limiting the value added services that can be created.
At this point you may be asking yourself: “But how can Blockchain technology help achieve an open standard?”. There are many long-winded technical answers to this question. However, you do not need to know the nitty gritty technical details of what Blockchain is and how the technology works in order to take advantage of the opportunities the technology can support. In fact, you don’t even necessarily need to know the definition of open blockchain! All you need to know is that it can offer you certain advantages that centralised ticketing systems can’t offer by themselves, but that these ticketing systems can deliver by adopting a blockchain-based solution. And that’s it! …. Open blockchain what …? How about just Open, and we don’t mean open in the way a published API with access controlled by a single company is open!
“We strongly believe that open and standards are the keys to innovation, control and oversight. Open blockchains can bring open innovation to entities interacting in low trust environments. But don’t just take our word for it.”
Here are three ways in which this technology can benefit the industry:
- It allows the setup of uncircumventable rules around digital assets
- It facilitates standardisation, increasing operational efficiency, reducing integration cost and enabling new revenue streams.
- It is organisation-agnostic and decentralised, meaning it delivers full audibility while ensuring security and immutability
Moreover, we keep talking about “open blockchains” and not simply “blockchains”. Why? Because in reality there are three different types of Blockchain: Closed, private and open and a vital piece of information about these types is often left out of the debate. Blockchain solutions that are closed or private, and created by profit-seeking entities with competing interests over ticketing inventory, only fix part of the problem and create new issues.
- Closed or private blockchains: These are analogous to an intranet (vs the open internet). A challenge these blockchains face is that they can be acquired or influenced by single entities, making them less secure and not necessarily trusted by competitors. This essentially makes them little more than inefficient databases.
- Blockchain solutions created by ticket-selling entities typically seek to offer an alternative Software as a Service and/or distribution platform to existing ticket-selling entities and cannot necessarily be trusted by their competitors to be a fair, independent tool for the benefit of the whole industry.
This is why as Aventus, we decided at the start of our journey to use open blockchains for events and live entertainment ticketing. Our protocol, ehich is an open blockchain ticketing standard for events supports next-generation smart tickets without the need to change the full
technology stack that currently supports and delivers ticketing, payments and CRM etc.
- The protocol supports oversight, control and communication with the fan throughout the life of the ticket.
- It supports third parties operating within the ecosystem and agreeing to play by the rules set by the industry and rights-holders to innovate around tickets, ultimately allowing the industry and rights-holdets to benefit from innovation.
- Importantlty the protocol can be adopted with a single integration rather than requiring a new integration with every new third party service provider.
If you aren’t yet entirely convinced, then here are a few more reasons why we believe the Aventus protocol can be the standard for event tickets:
- We are a live, open-source, technology-agnostic standard for smart tickets on an open blockchain.
- We are independent, not for profit and committed to using our funding to benefit the event industry.
- We have come up with a solution that uniquely combines the speed and privacy of closed blockchains with the security and reach of open blockchains in enterprise-grade software. Meaning:
• We deliver scalability
• We deliver security, privacy, and very importantly all aspects of the Aventus Protocol are GDPR compliant
By now we hope you’re close to being convinced, however you may be saying to yourself: “This all sounds great, but what are my actual tangible benefits”. We hear you:
• You can control transfer:
Price caps and commissions to rights holders, only through certain secondaries, timebased restrictions, and more.
• You can communicate with tickets: Regardless of where they reside or who owns them
• You can open up distribution and innovation: Let third parties interact with your tickets e.g. non-traditional sales channels, data processors, marketing engines and more without the need for the manual creation and enforcement of paper contracts.
• Real time ticket provenance: Know when and where tickets transfer
But only if you want to!