Blocktix ICO - Review
Today we'll be taking a deep look into Blocktix 's ICO using our usual ICO Valuation methodology.
What is Blocktix ?
Blocktix is an ethereum-based decentralized solution to distribute, advertise and trade tickets. Yes, tickets. As in sports events tickets, concerts tickets, parties or whatever tickets you can think of.
Business model
The company aims to be a platform in which event hosts distribute their tickets and the general public acquires them. This model should drastically reduce costs, since there is no profit-oriented entity, no printing, no mailing, no sellers whatsoever to be paid. They claim costs will be reduced by 90%.
Also, usual distribution incurs in fraud risks, which a blockchain based solution should solve.
The way it works is: A company should have enough tokens to host an event on the platform and distribute its tickets through it. Once the user possess a ticket he can sell to other users within the platform. In order to buy the tickets the user must pay using ETH or TIX tokens. At the event, the staff can use any smartphone to scan a QR code corresponding to the ticket.
Their business plan is quite accurate in stating that their biggest challenge is adoption, and they plan to cope with it by hosting a few concerts in California at the very beginning, with exclusive distribution through the Blocktix platform, thus forcing some user base into the platform.
To prevent fake events from coming up, token holders will be able to vouch for events that they know are for real and event hosts are charged with a fee, to discourage such practices.
The Team
They all seem like real people and are invested in the project. Their CEO is an active community member and their CTO credentials match, he's proved himself within the crypto community. The one problem is that they state on their website that:
The Blocktix team's experience in the event hosting and marketing industries (...)
And I couldn't verify that experience in any of the members. They all seem like sound crypto investors and community members, but not event hosts, distributors and the likes.
Overall, the team's evaluation is positive.
The Market
To foster brevity I won't talk about the broad market of ticketing. The blockchain space for ticketing seems enough crowded already. Some examples are Cloudchain, LAVA and TicketNinja. All of them seem to be at a very early stage, no business plan whatsoever.
Number #1 contender should be Aventus who has a game plan in motion and is soon to launch its ICO. As such, its ICO review is also on the way.
So far looks like no one is occupying this space, at least within the blockchain industry, but we have quite a few contenders out there. Blocktix happens to be the first out.
Token Value Proposal
They state in bold letters on their website:
There should be no expectation of profit from TIX token ownership or from the Blocktix system.
They claim the ticket is intended for whoever plans on being an active member in the sense of attending events, hosting events or verifying events.
It's a bit odd to invest in something that the issuer clearly state as not being an investment. Perhaps, they've done so to prevent from themselves from legal issues. Still, it is worth to understand that the token's price main driver is adoption. Even though you can pay for your tickets using ethereum, you need TIX to host an event. Since the token has a finite supply, adoption should drive the prices up.
That being said, active token holders might have a more interesting investment opportunity: The event fee (the one charged to make it appear on the platforms feed) will be distributed to token holders that take part in the verification process. The event can be promoted within the platform, and the proceedings from these promotions will also go to holders who participate in verification.
The downside is, it is still not clear how the verification process works. They mention that holders can approve or report events, but that's all.
Final comments
As a final comment, it is worth noting that they have a hard cap of USD 7,500,000 . This is quite modest compared to late ICOs and is a sign of good faith to my eyes.
Conclusion
I've been flirting with the blockchain applied to ticketing subject for a while. It looks like such an obvious and efficient solution to the ticketing industry. Also, it should be very easy and cheap to implement it, and adoption can come really fast. Since there are so many contenders out there it's hard to say which one is the most prepared team for the challenge.
Blocktix's looks like a technically qualified company, which, as mentioned before, is highly desirable on a blockchain endeavor.
A major drawback, to my view, is that they do not have any plans to accept fiat currency as payment. That might be crucial to massive adoption, specially if we do not head to a crypto-based economy (as I described here). In such a scenario this company would simply go bankrupt, or have to reinvent itself.
EDIT: One member of the Blocktix team contacted me to let me know that a native Credit Card Gateway has been introduced in their platform, that certainly adds value to the project. That also shows that the team is interacting with the community which is highly desirable on any distributed project .
Anyhow, token holders are not shareholders, but still highly dependent on the company's success.
Overall I believe Blocktix is worth a buck since they have a sound plan, a user base generation immediate plan, and are the first ones out there (which is always an advantage). But I'm particularly more excited to see the upcoming contenders, hoping some of them are more business and fiat-economy oriented.