By
Kofi Ansah
September 20th, 2022
In the last couple of years, there has been a huge drive to apply the possibilities of blockchain technology to the many industries it could be used in.
Banks and governments are even clamoring to apply blockchain solutions, and Gartner research recently named it one of the most important upcoming technology revolutions.
When evaluating the potential of a new blockchain innovation or platform, there are two main factors to consider: impact and fit. Impact refers to how many and how large the industries that it affects are. Fit refers to how much benefit they can bring to that industry.
One application that has shown a lot of promise lately in terms of both impact and fit is the ticketing and entertainment industries. Impact-wise the market is huge: it will grow to around $25 bln annually in the next couple of years. But what is more interesting is fit between ticketing and Blockchain technology; considering that tickets are basically digital tokens that designate ownership of an intangible good (the exact characteristics of a cryptocurrency), this means the entire ticketing industry could be run on a Blockchain.
A Blockchain startup based in the Netherlands has over the past few months ramping up towards an upcoming full launch, and they believe they have cracked this problem. GUTS tickets leverage decentralized Blockchains to make the entertainment experience better.
Old-fashioned ticket industry
But what would this achieve? There are three big problems regarding buying tickets for shows and gigs. The first major issue is pretty straightforward; scamming is rife in the industry which has become even worse either the advent of digital tickets that are even easier to fake it copy than physical tickets in most cases. Secondly, there is the scalping/touting issue whereby tickets are resold for many times their original price. Finally, there is the more structural and less obvious issue of the ticketing companies themselves charging middleman markups.
This all leads to a situation where artists cannot cater to their real fans and the fans themselves often get scammed or end up paying way over the odds for a gig.
A more transparent link between fans and artists
The GUTS team in their white paper outlined their “vision of an efficient and transparent primary and secondary ticketing market, cutting out the profits made by parties adding little to no value in the value chain. The protocol allows ticket owners to resell their ticket anonymously to other consumers directly in the web-app without the risk of being defrauded or getting scalping with fees/excessive margins.”
This would be in keeping with the overall goal of cryptotechnology: decentralizing industries while guaranteeing security.
This will all run with their GET token, which creates a “smart-ticketing protocol built upon the Ethereum Blockchain that will facilitate the sale of event tickets by issuing smart tickets to wallet addresses on the Blockchain. The owner of such a smart ticket is free to anonymously sell his or her ticket but has to do so within the decentralized infrastructure of the protocol. This ensures that ticket trades are done safely and within a set price margin. This is ensured as the smart tickets QR code is dynamic and will change as a factor over time and owner of the ticket.
This makes trading/selling the QR code outside of the protocol impossible by default. The token,
the GET, will act as the main stable value holding asset in the protocol in each event cycle. This characteristic is necessary for this honest ticketing platform, as the token FIAT value locking attribute adds both security and price stability to the protocol during each event-cycle.”
Up and running
Notable about GUTS is that they have already demonstrated the feasibility of the system with several artists and have sold over 10,000 tickets on the platform to date. If they can demonstrate the impact and fit of their solution to more investors and industry partners, then quick expansion could be on the cards.
The GET token sale is currently running.
