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CM.com has acquired GUTS Tickets in a move designed to drive the expansion and adoption of blockchain ticketing technology.
CM.com is a provider of cloud software for conversational commerce that enables businesses to deliver high-quality customer service relations. CM.com will assume full management of the company.
GUTS Tickets, established in 2016, will maintain its identity – at least for now – following the acquisition. Its founders said that GUTS will continue to prioritise fair practices thanks to its reliance on the OPEN Ticketing Ecosystem blockchain. The sale also means that GUTS’ founders can fully concentrate on OPEN project, which not only aids the sell of tickets using blockchain technology but also concentrates on decentralised funding for events.
OPEN’s event financing can help artists use their unchain ticket inventory for future events as collateral to raise funds from those with a crypto wallet. The aim is to help creators avoid predatory loans from big corporations.
The CM.com deal was the strongest move for GUTS co-founder Maarten Bloemers because while the group sold millions of tickets in its local Dutch market, international growth has proved harder.
Additionally, attempts to scale globally came from GET Protocol, a white label product borne out of GUTS Tickets. GET Protocol was then rebranded as OPEN in early 2024, with other ticketing systems able to plug in and benefit from blockchain technology.
“We came to the conclusion that mass distribution doesn’t come from growing our own ticketing business, but it comes from enabling existing ticketing companies to use our tech,” Bloemers told TheTicketingBusiness.
“So that’s what we’ve built over the last five years. Then we were at a certain point where GUTS was basically getting in the way of our expansion because companies would say that ‘you have your own ticketing company – you’re providing me a service on the one hand and you’re being a competitor on the other’.
“They were right. And with our mission to create an open ticketing standard, we sold GUTS to CM and they are obligated to use our tech which is basically nine-folding our volume.”
Selling GUTS will allow OPEN’s technology to become more accessible to a much broader market, and CM was perfectly placed to do this.
“We came to the conclusion that mass distribution doesn’t come from growing our own ticketing business, but it comes from enabling existing ticketing companies to use our tech.”
“We’ve been working with CM for quite some time now. One of their other brands is called Your Ticketing Provider, who is also one of our main clients in the OPEN sense, and we did a very successful project with the Formula One in Zandvoort,” explained Bloemers.
The project in question saw 100,000 attendees at the 2023 Dutch Formula One Grand Prix receive a collectible to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Zandvoort circuit.
Bloemers continued: “The amount of traction is very important to us. The number needs to go up radically. That expansion just wasn’t happening with GUTS. We were doing very well in the local market but internationally, it just wasn’t scaling.
“Also, there are quite some differences between markets. So here in Holland, we don’t have this broad distribution like they do in the UK [for example]. And then, if you want to attack different verticals like sports, live events and museums, that’s a different beast altogether.
“It was too much hassle to create all of their different functionalities, so we decided that it was way better to distribute the tech, and so we sold it [GUTS].”
Transparent and traceable
The use of GUTS’ technology means tickets are transparent and traceable, helping to eliminate scalping and fraudulent behaviour.
The foundation behind OPEN is working on a secondary market module, which is due to be launched this year. Because of the reliance on blockchain technology, secondary ticketing can become more “radically honest” according to Bloemers.
Tickets purchased via this technology contain a unique code that is automatically renewed with each transaction, helping to prevent duplication and fraud. If the ticket is resold, the original code becomes invalid and the ticket returns to regular sales at the fixed price.
Companies, like CM or GUTS, that utilise the protocol will benefit from this new secondary ticketing module, as well as artists, who will have more control over the way they want to sell tickets for their events.
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