First things first, a little housekeeping. From here on out we will be releasing a blog like this one every month, to keep you informed on what’s going on. This does not mean that we won’t write other, more specific blogs on other relevant topics. It does mean, however, that you will know exactly when you can expect a new update from our end: In the last week of every month.
It will probably not be news for you to read about TicketMaster’s acquisition of blockchain ticketing platform Upgraded. There have been some questions about this with regards to our views on this purchase and what this means for GET and the viability of our project.
Firstly, our opinion is that this is a positive step. Although you could raise questions about the way Upgraded tackles the dishonest reselling of tickets and with that the ultimate motive behind the acquisition -the truth is you never know what these kinds of moves will mean for the future- we are ultimately happy with this news, as it validates the application of blockchain ticketing on a larger scale.
For us it has obviously been clear for quite some time that this is the way the ticketing industry is headed. Seeing the major players now dip their toes into blockchain is good PR, both for them and for us. As mentioned it remains to be seen if and to what degree this acquisition will have any impact on the ticketing sphere. Meanwhile we are building and growing.
Let’s move on by looking back! The first ever GET Protocol buy-back auction (needed for Carré’s previously sold tickets)
was held on Sunday, September 30th 2018. The total demand was filled within exactly 20 seconds. You can track the submitted transactions on Etherscan. (Note that since the demand was met relatively quickly, all tokens sent after this point were returned, hence the outgoing transactions.)
What might be more important than the success of these transactions is the fact that this chain of events (the large sale & subsequently executed buy-back), proves the concept and structure of the protocol — not to mention that it’s all driven by actual, real world demand.
It underlines the vision of GET Protocol: To apply the benefits of blockchain, immutable transparency and accountability, in the world of ticketing, where it is so desperately needed. This is the case not just for the event industry, but for many other markets. GET Protocol is designed to service ticketing companies in a broad scope, from sports to public transportation to any situation where a ticket provides a right to access.
Let’s just watch this one again, shall we? Have you shared this with everyone you know? Even that Nigerian prince you’ve been corresponding with? Thought so. Send it to him. Have him invest.
The next buy-back will be announced before long, pending the release of exact
details of upcoming sales.
The long weekend of 17–22 October marked this year’s edition of Amsterdam Dance Event, better known as ADE. For five days Amsterdam becomes even more of a logistical clusterfuck than it already is, as thousands upon thousands of music lovers and professionals from the scene descend upon our humble cheese-loving, tulip-honoring, prostitute-tolerating city.
For us, this provided a great opportunity to meet new people and reconnect with others without having to fly all over the globe. To make things even easier, we opened up our office for anyone in town for ADE who was in need of a quiet place
to work, or just wanted somewhere to enjoy a beer or coffee. This way, we had a continuous stream of meetings without having to leave our office.
‘Don’t sell yourself, make them come to you!’- Some guy selling tickets for his
get-rich-quick webinar.
Kidding aside, we were able to have some great meetings during this week. As
GUTS Tickets’ name and position within the ticketing scene grows, we are being
acknowledged by more and more relevant people and parties. In other words; doors
are opening.
Not to brag or sound like a child, but we have lots of meetings with lots of companies and people. More than you think. We don’t namedrop or divulge too much about the meetings we have as we don’t like to hype for the sake of hyping —it’s
bad business and let’s face it, it’s just not very classy. That’s why we are careful about what we publicly announce or disclose, as we don’t want to make any promises that we can’t keep. We are however almost ready to share news about
a certain party and will be announcing specifics as soon as an agreement is signed.
One of the meetings we can already talk about was with the Viberate team. We’ve been in touch for a while but it was good to finally meet face to face and share ideas and possibilities for the future.
For more updates on this front I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until next month’s blog. (Or maybe a bit earlier if things go well, but no promises!)
Last week our CEO Maarten and token economics developer Kasper gave a presentation at HHS about GET Protocol and its workings. During the session, which was a part of the Mastering Blockchain course, they discussed everything from the founding of GET Protocol, including the ICO, up until where things stand and what our plans are for the future.
On the technical side, there are always many things going on. Here’s a quick round-up of just a few things that our developers are developin’:
The big sale for Jochem Myjer’s shows at Carré was an excellent test for our systems and provided us with some great
learnings and opportunities to further improve upon, which is being done as you read this. (If you are browsing our blog archive and come across this blog, this statement is invalidated. We will probably have finished these improvements. Also, how’s the future? How did global warming turn out?)
Some big advancements have been made in the user friendliness and overall user experience of the scanner app that is used by venue staff to scan tickets at the entrance of venues. Over the past years we have collected loads of feedback and
insights from the field, which have all been used to update the app in order to make the process of checking in customers even easier and clearer. It’s crucial to streamline and optimize this, in order to be able to scale efficiently and make it easy for new venues to adopt our system.
One of the bigger nuts to crack in the roll-out and expansion of our system is the implementation of a ticket-sharing functionality. Without giving too much away, there have been some breakthroughs on this front which are very promising.
Once this is fleshed out completely we will share more details with you.
Additionally we have managed to make our client dashboard completely autonomous, meaning that any client of GUTS can independently view live updates from events and extract valuable statistics and learnings without the need for any support from our side. That means one thing: scaling!
The onboarding process of new clients is now way more efficient and events can be added and integrated seamlessly.
This was a big goal for this year, as it propels our scaling capacities to new heights.
That’ll wrap up the update for this month. As always, feel free to shoot us any questions in Telegram. Like I promised at the beginning of this shared word adventure that we have just gone through, we will be releasing monthly updates similar to this one. As this is the first blog in this new format, we would love to hear your feedback, suggestions and copious amounts of praise!
Any questions or want to know more about what we do? Join our active Telegram community for any questions you might have, read our whitepaper, visit the website, join the discussion on the GET Protocol Reddit. Or get yourself a smart event ticket in our sandbox environment. Download the GUTS Tickets app on IOS or Android.
