A $3 million tweet, a $600,000 cat gif and an eye-wateringly expensive collection of NBA moments that people have spent around $230 million trading so far. These curiosities are connected by an emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionise the way humans do business with one another.

Digital assets have previously not been seen as collectable items; why would anybody pay for something they could download for free with a quick Google search?

The problem? How to verify which picture or gif is the actual original.

There’s no collectable value to something anybody can download and display if there is no proof of originality. Enter blockchain-based Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that prove authenticity and ownership, with the option to attach smart contracts to those digital assets permanently.

Funnily enough, this technology translates perfectly to event ticketing, so at Seatlab, we’re creating an NFT ticketing platform to eliminate fraud, reduce the impact of scalping and forge a closer connection between fans and the artists they love.

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Cat games

One of the early uses of blockchain technology for recreation was an online game called CryptoKitties, in which users trade virtual pet cats.

Each cat is a digital asset, or Non-Fungible Token, making them a unique, one-off item that is not replaceable with another of its kind. Records and smart contracts kept on the Ethereum blockchain allowed users to prove ownership, breed, trade or sell their virtual cats with each other without the need for third-party mediation or supervision. It is this technology that has been utilised in the sale of other digital assets.

Humans love collecting rare items, and while CryptoKitties’ limit of around 4 billion cats means they aren’t super rare, it has quickly been established that the same model and technology could be applied to genuinely rare items.

When twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his original tweet (the first on the platform) for close to $3 million (and donated the money to charity), the fact that it is the actual first tweet was the reason it commanded the price it did. By proving authenticity, digital assets and art can, in theory, become as expensive and desirable as physical art.

The authenticity of this tweet was verified by data securely held on one of the various blockchains, the same encrypted ledger that cryptocurrencies use to verify their transactions.

It’s this way of looking at blockchains as an irrefutable ledger of data that has the potential to redefine event ticketing, making it serve artists, fans and the live events community like never before.

The Evolution of Ticketing

In the switch from paper tickets to digital, a vast amount of paper was saved (which is incredible!), but the collectable, sentimental value of a ticket was also changed.

Physical paper tickets were made hard to reproduce by the quality of the paper, complex designs and intricate watermarks, features which sometimes made them collectable or worth keeping for the original attendee. Although paper tickets were difficult to forge on a small scale because the cost of replicating the design and watermarks was rarely worth it, if an event were large enough, people would try to replicate the tickets on a large scale. Even then, replicating the quality of the originals was hard; in the same way, you can’t just print a few banknotes on your printer at home!

The boom of digital technology brought in QR codes and online ticketing providers like Seatlab, offering a cost-effective way of ticketing. A unique QR code, when scanned, is the stamp of authenticity – communicating with data on a server for verification.

This technology represented a step forwards in the battle against ticket fraud. It also reduced costs for producing tickets, lowered production times and eliminated the need for physical postage of tickets. Soon, the process became the smooth transaction it is today: select your seat on an interactive map, checkout using credentials established from third parties or your own email, and receive an email confirmation and a QR code to be presented on entry. 

However, the solution provided by Web2 platforms has not addressed the issues of scalping and fraud that still plague the event ticketing industry.

Scalping has become such a problem for the live events community that ticketing platforms currently employ dynamic pricing to try and beat it. Dynamic pricing often ends up in a familiar story of discontent for fans who either miss out to scalpers anyway or end up paying outrageous prices due to the demand driven by scalpers.

With no secondary market control, event ticketing currently is at a loss for ways to stop scalping from ruining the event experience for everyone involved. However, with Web3, there is the opportunity to change this.

What is a blockchain?

Simply put, a blockchain is almost self-explanatory. It is a series of blocks containing data that are chained together. Where it becomes more technical to understand is how this data is any more secure than other data encrypted by traditional means stored on a server.

Information on a blockchain is stored on a network of computers (referred to as “nodes”) that use the blockchain, meaning there is no single, centralised storage. Once a block is full of data, it is encrypted and chained onto the previous one in chronological order. This means that not only is there no one point to attack to access the data, but the data is stored on multiple nodes on the blockchain. Once encrypted onto the blockchain, the data then becomes irrefutable. This makes it almost impossible to tamper with the data held on the blockchain.

A blockchain then acts as a permanent, irrefutable record of all the transactions which have taken place on it, which is how cryptocurrency transactions are verified. Instead of contacting a bank, or middleman, to secure a traditional transaction, the blockchain simply looks back through its data and checks whether or not the funds exist before permanently recording them as transferred to the recipient.
This is not an in-depth explanation of the technology, but one that gives a good overview. For a more detailed understanding of blockchains, check this out.

Quick Summary:

Blockchain is decentralised, encrypted and cross-checked. This means that when a transaction takes place on the blockchain, multiple nodes will verify that the transaction is legitimate, using their encrypted data.

Smart Contracts

The security of the blockchain gives us an insight into how strong ticket authentication backed by the blockchain could be, but the additional power of unmediated transactions comes in the form of smart contracts.

Smart contracts are deterministic programs triggered by certain events. If that sounds a bit “programmer”, it’s because they are just that – programmed pieces of code that execute when certain conditions are met.

The foundation of many programming languages is “if/when” statements; smart contracts are no different. The smart contracts are attached to data on the blockchain, in our case, tickets. Whenever an action happens with the ticket (a sale, for example), the binding smart contract is executed, and a set of actions occur if the conditions in the smart contract are met. “If/when the ticket is sold….do these things”.

Where smart contracts have the potential to change ticket selling is in the “reselling” of tickets. If a customer buys an NFT ticket for an event and decides they can no longer attend, when they sell the NFT ticket, the smart contract can be programmed to allocate a percentage of that sale to the event organisers, artists, athletes, etc. if desired. This smart contract will continue to run every time the ticket is sold, meaning if it changes hands ten times, revenue will be generated ten times.

The owner of the genuine ticket will have the NFT, proving authenticity and ownership, allowing them entry to an event. Any resales of the ticket that take place have the potential to generate revenue for the people putting on the show.

Event Day

The technological benefits of NFT ticketing are substantial, but Web3 is still a mystery to many people, thanks to some volatility in the crypto world. That’s why we’ve built SeatlabNFT, an NFT ticketing platform that makes the experience of buying an NFT ticket as seamless as possible.

Artists and event creators are able to sell tickets on our platform for free, using an intuitive user interface and seller dashboard. We’ve made it possible to create NFT tickets in 5 easy steps, giving the live events community access to the power of Web3.

For fans, NFT ticketing transforms the buying experience, creating fairer access to tickets and using the traceability of blockchain to create a closer connection to the artists they love.

What Is NFT Ticketing

It’s not just about allowing customers to have fancier-looking tickets. NFT technology is a perfect fit for event ticketing. The proof of authenticity, traceability and secondary market control that NFTs offer directly address the issues currently plaguing the event ticketing industry.

• Reduced Fraud. This one we’ve covered heavily, but NFT ticketing has the potential to eliminate ticket fraud entirely.
• Secondary Market Control. Using smart contracts to direct revenue and set price ceilings will reduce the impact of scalping and mean that secondary sales generate revenue for the artists or event creators putting on a show.
• Attached Perks. Smart contracts allow Seatlab’s users to bind perks to tickets, meaning returning customers, early buyers or anybody else you want to reward can have perks attached to their ticket. The perks could be anything from free food inside the venue to VIP access.

Cost. NFT tickets are cheap to produce and can be distributed by email or SMS. Once on the NEAR Protocol blockchain, transaction fees are never more than $0.01.

NFT Ticketing Platforms

Given the perfect fit of NFT technology and event ticketing, there are already a few NFT ticketing companies out there. However, blockchain ticketing requires that the blockchain network be scalable, to handle mass transactions at speed.

SeatlabNFT is built on the climate-neutral NEAR Protocol blockchain. It’s a layer-one blockchain which is secure, scalable and fast, with permanently low transaction fees.

With the NEAR Protocol network able to scale at speed, SeatlabNFT is a platform that will redefine event ticketing.

Start selling tickets online today!

Schedule a 30-Minute product demo with an expert Q&A