Introduction

You’ve seen GET Protocol mentioned here and there, perhaps you’ve heard about their mission to become the worldwide protocol standard for ticketing, heck you might’ve used them unknowingly when you went to an event (like Cosmoverse) lately. There’s people enthousiastic about GET Protocol and using it, but you don’t really know what they do. In this post I’m going to give you a quick overview of the problems they aim to solve and their solution.

• Do note that there’s much more to tell, but then it wouldn’t be quick anymore.

• There’s a few links I like to share but they seem to get autodeleted so I’ll post them in a comment.

• Summary at the bottom for those that dislike large posts.

Which industry is GET Protocol aiming for?

GET Protocol is aiming at disrupting the Ticketing Industry. The Ticketing Industry is basically comprised of event organisers, fans/customers, ticketeers, venues, and, regretfully, scalpers as well.

The goal of the Ticketing Industry is to get the fan/customer to buy a ticket to visit an artist or other event, spending money at the venue if applicable.

There’s a primary market and secondary market for tickets. The primary market is the market where the event organiser controls the ticket price by selling through ticketeers, while the secondary market is the market where tickets are resold by would-be attendees and scalpers ticket touts.

Which problems does the Ticketing Industry face?

Ever bought a ticket to a famous artist or event? You stood in the digital queue for half an hour with no success, only to read the newspaper later on saying “Artist X tickets sold out within 2 minutes!”. You take to secondary market options and what do you know, hundreds if not thousands of tickets available for you to purchase for that famous artist or event! There’s just this tiny footnote however; The tickets have at least trippled in price. Furthermore, you don’t even know if the ticket you bought is valid or not!

While scalping and fake tickets are already massive problems on their own, it turned out certain ticketeers themselves have joined the scalper side of things. It turned out Ticketmaster (one of the, if not the, biggest ticketeer known) collaborates with ticket touts, giving them a percentage of the tickets to sell on the secondary ticket market. That means a certain percentage of tickets for an event were never even up for sale on the primary market. This lack of transparancy is yet another issue the Ticketing Industry faces.

On the other side of the Ticketing Industry sit the venues and event organisers. Since the secondary market is basically a free-for-all, venues and event organisers (i.e. artists) do not know who bought tickets on the secondary market. This means there’s no connection between venues/artists and customers/fans, which in turn means the venues/artists don’t know who their audience is and if the right people are reached. This lack of insight is less apparent for ticketbuyers, but nonetheless an issue the Ticketing Industry faces.

Although the above is quite substantial already and there’s much more going on, I’ll go with one last issue to keep this brief; Merch selling at venues. Artists are the ones doing the work, the ones fans/customers come to an event for. These artists often sell merch at the venues. What you probably don’t realise is that the venue takes a large piece of the merche income for allowing the artist to sell merch at the venue. Depending on the artists and piece taken, this could mean a serious cut in income for the artist.

While scalping, fake tickets and lack of transparancy take the bulk of it, all in all there’s a lot askew within the Ticketing Industry.

How does GET Protocol aim to solve these?

GET Protocol itself is, well, a protocol. This protocol is basically an ecosystem the tickets dwell in, tickets can never leave the ecosystem. How they create that ecosystem is written below under “Grant insight in the secondary market”.

The GET Protocol is the backend using blockchain technology to register and verify ownership of a ticket and provide transparency to the ticketing cycle.

The protocol uses the $GET token as fuel for any interaction with the blockchain; buying, selling, reselling, scanning, claiming or invalidating a ticket. This ensures a common way of interacting with the protocol no matter where the ticketeer is from. There’s a bunch of other benefits to the token, but I won’t go into them here.

The protocol combines a bunch of techniques to provide transparancy, make scalping impossible, make fake tickets impossible, grant more insight in the secondary market and do something about merch income cuts. Let’s go at them one by one.

Provide transparancy
Blockchain itself provides much needed transparancy. After all, every transaction is visible to everyone. Apart from that the protocol aims at providing transparancy wherever it goes.Take queueing for example. While usually you have no idea whether or not the queue was created fairly, with GET Protocol you can verify it thanks to their integration of Chainlink’s VRF which provides verifiable randomness.Another example is their ticket explorer, that gives you real time insight in the ticket statistics. Or their subgraph that lets you query the protocol usage in-dept.

Make scalping & fake tickets impossible
By linking a ticket to a SIM card and phone, the genuine owner of a ticket can be verified. GET Protocol combines this with a dynamic QR code to prevent selling the ticket outside their ecosystem, thus avoiding ticket fraud. This solves the fake ticket problem as well; there’s simply no way to (re)sell a ticket other than through their ecosystem.

Grant insight in the secondary market
This is an important one because it’s a result of the ecosystem GET Protocol created. By merging the primary market and secondary market together, the GET Protocol closed ecosystem is created. Both markets are regulated by the protocol and while there’s a distinction between the markets, the tickets gained from both markets are exactly the same.

Since the secondary market is an integrated part of the closed ecosystem, the protocol (and therefore the event organisers and venues) knows who a ticket has been resold to.

Do something about merch income cuts
Since the tickets are fully digital and provide a ‘right of entrance’, merch can be sold alongside a ticket to an event. That’s what’s called upsells. By allowing fans/customers to buy merch as upsells you not only remove the need of selling at the venue, but also the issue of limited merch.

Some more added value, a little thing called NFTs

Besides a way to solve existing issues, the protocol also aims at adding extra value to the ticketing usecase. A big example of that is NFT ticketing. Every ticket sold through the protocol is an NFT and can be claimed after the event. Besides being able to now claim a digital collectible much like you could with traditional paper tickets, this also opens new possibilities.

One of these is the ability to buy and sell your tickets, which you can do on the opensea market. Certain events, certain seatnumbers, might be worth something after the event. In fact, the ticket itself may have some added value after the event.

NFT tickets open up a lot of possibilities for fan<>artist interactions. Think about randomly making a few out of all event tickets have special perks like VIP access. Think about airdropping a special NFT among the attendees during the event. Think about giving free merch or discounts to those with multiple NFTs of a given artists, or even a backstage pass for the biggest fans.

An event ends after you went home, but with NFT tickets this doesn’t have to be the end of your experience. Your NFT ticket could give you access to a metaverse event for example. Evolving NFTs is another prime example. Imagine going to a beer festival and getting an evolving NFT. Besides it evolving depending on the beers you drink, it could also further evolve when you go to another beer festival that accepts the same NFT!

The possibilities for NFT tickets are endless. If you wish to know more about this specific usecase (news, other projects), I highly recommend checking out the subreddit “NFTTickets”.

GET Protocol’s solutions

While the protocol itself works as the backend, the team behind GET Protocol has thought about ways for ticketeers to easily implement this backend. They have created 2 products; one aimed at new ticketeers and ticketeers seeking a full package, the other at existing ticketeers wishing to dip their toes in fully digital NFT tickets.

White Label (WL)
The WL solution is a full package build on top of the protocol. It consists of an android&iOS app, payment system, dashboards, and ofcourse all the benefits that come with the GET Protocol. It’s a full package that allows the integrator to immediately start selling tickets.

The app is created in such a way that ticket buyers and sellers don’t need to know a single thing about the blockchain or crypto to buy a ticket. So while the protocol works with the $GET token, ticket buyers just pay with fiat. On the other side of things are the dashboards where integrators can see a bunch of statistics, but also need to top up on $GET as fuel for their tickets. Any need for blockchain/crypto knowledge is removed here as well; Integrators top up with fiat and just see a bunch of fuel and how many tickets they can issue with that fuel.

There’s multiple WL integrators, but the most well known is GUTS Tickets. Based in the Netherlands, but having issued events across the globe.

Digital Twin (DT)
The DT solution is a non-invasive product that can exist alongside a ticketeer’s existing infrastructure. All it takes is a few lines of code to call the DT API, that’s all. With it, a ticketeer can create a digital NFT copy of their own issued (paper) tickets. It’s a way for existing ticketeers to dip their toes in the NFT world. There’s more features coming to the DT when requested, but since it’s relatively new this digital copy is the first start.

Since it’s relatively new there’s a single DT active right now; YourTicketProvider. Based in the Netherlands, they sell about 2 million tickets yearly. Another one that’s been announced to join EOY is eTicketaBlanca in Columbia.

Open Invitation for NFT events

To showcase the power of NFT tickets and show the world how powerfull the system is that GET Protocol has build, they’ve recently extended an open invitation to ticket NFT events from now til the end of Q2 for free. If you wish to host an NFT event after seeing how succesful NFT.NYC has been, be sure to contact them!

Summary

To summarise what we’ve iterated over:

• The ticketing Industry encompasses event organisers, ticketeers, venues, fans/customers and regretfully ticket touts.

• Ticket touts (scalpers) and big ticketeers like Ticketmaster weaponise the relation between you and the artist, extracting money out of the process without adding anything of value themselves.

• GET Protocol has created a protocol that uses blockchain and other smart technologies to tackle the problems the Ticketing Industry face, as well as add new value to the ticketing usecase like NFT ticketing.

• GET Protocol has created 2 products on top of the protocol to ease the onboarding of new and existing ticketeers.

• To showcase the power of NFT ticketing, an open invitation ticket NFT events for free has been extended til the end of Q2 2022.

• While this post has gone into the benefits GET Protocol offers to the ticketing usecase rather extensively, it hasn’t touched upon the tokenomics side of things. If you wish to know more about that be sure to check out the faq in the comments, or just ask your questions below this post.

• Comment holds some links.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/get-protocol/