Conversation with Merlin [email protected] · Fri Nov 17 2023

the novel case of blockchain application

Blockchain technology has seen numerous applications across various industries, showcasing its potential to revolutionize traditional processes. Some prominent novel applications of blockchain include:

  1. Supply Chain Management: Blockchain can be used to track and authenticate every step of a product's journey through the supply chain, ensuring transparency and reducing the risk of counterfeit products.

  2. Voting Systems: Implementing blockchain in voting systems can enhance security, transparency, and accessibility while mitigating fraud and manipulation.

  3. Healthcare Records Management: Blockchain can provide a secure and interoperable platform for managing healthcare records, ensuring data integrity, security, and patient privacy.

  4. Digital Identity Management: Blockchain offers a decentralized and secure solution for managing and verifying digital identities, reducing identity theft and fraud.

  5. Intellectual Property Rights Protection: Utilizing blockchain can help establish a transparent and immutable ledger for tracking and protecting intellectual property rights such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks.

  6. Decentralized Finance (DeFi): The emergence of blockchain-based financial services provides opportunities for peer-to-peer lending, decentralized trading, and automated smart contracts, potentially transforming traditional banking and financial systems.

  7. Carbon Offset Trading: Blockchain can facilitate transparent and secure carbon offset trading, enabling companies to track and trade their carbon emissions and offsets in a verifiable manner.

As blockchain technology continues to mature, its applications are likely to expand into even more novel and innovative areas, contributing to the transformation of multiple industries.

concert tickets blockchain application

Blockchain technology has the potential to transform how concert tickets are bought, sold, and managed. Here's an overview of how blockchain could be applied in this context:

  1. Immutable Ownership: With blockchain, concert tickets could be represented as unique digital tokens. The ownership of these tokens can be recorded and tracked on the blockchain, ensuring that each ticket sold corresponds to a unique and immutable record, reducing the risk of fraud and counterfeit tickets.

  2. Transparency in Resale: Blockchain technology can increase transparency in ticket resales. It can securely track the history of each ticket, ensuring that buyers know the exact path a ticket has taken before it reaches them, and eliminating the risk of overpriced resales by dishonest scalpers.

  3. Secure Transfers: Blockchain securely facilitates peer-to-peer transfers of digital assets, like concert tickets. This means that fans could securely sell or transfer their ticket to someone else without the need for a third party to validate or facilitate the transaction.

  4. Smart Contracts: Blockchain can facilitate the use of smart contracts. In the context of concert tickets, this functionality can allow certain terms to be programmed directly into the ticket. For instance, an artist or concert venue could stipulate that if a ticket is resold, a portion of the resale profit must go directly back to the artist, assuring fair profit distribution.

  5. Collectible Tickets: Concert tickets represented as Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) offer an additional dimension: they can serve as collectible items. They could carry exclusive content, like digital autographs or event photos, enhancing their value and significance for the holders.

Overall, the use of blockchain technology in the concert ticketing space could streamline and secure the process, providing better control and flexibility for artists, fairer prices for fans, and a reduction in the influence of unscrupulous third-party resellers.

A common frustration among people who buy tickets to concerts, plays, and other events is that each ticket carries multiple fees. The fees often vary in ways that seem hard to comprehend, making the final cost unpredictable. Through the tickets lifecycle, multiple intermediaries can add to the cost and collect revenue, with no monetary benefit to the original creators and contributors to the event. In addition, bots pervade current systems. These bots buy up tickets from the primary seller and sell them at a much higher price in the secondary market. Behind the scenes, there is a lot of wasted and repetitive effort between organizations due to a lack of collaboration. Blockchain, and the digital asset technologies it supports, could enable access to events at a lower and more transparent cost by optimizing the resale process, promoting collaborative competition among sellers, and providing a more holistic experience for the consumer. In this post, we discuss how a blockchain-based ticketing system can greatly benefit consumers. We design a hypothetical system while highlighting considerations that need to be made when designing such a system. Issuing Event Tickets as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) A non-fungible token (NFT) is a representation of a unique asset stored on the blockchain. Non-fungibility means that an item or asset is not interchangeable with another token due to unique properties that affect its value. For example, unique baseball cards are non-fungible because the cards have different values based on edition number, design, player, and rarity. Creating event tickets as NFTs guarantees that the ticket is unique, cant be reproduced, and can provide granular access to add-ons based on its unique attributes. The NFTs interaction with the blockchain is also programmable with the use of smart contracts and every interaction exists forever on the blockchain. The process of minting creates the NFT with a token identifier mapped to an owner via smart contract. The current owner can transfer the NFT to a new owner by calling a transfer function within the smart contract, which then reassigns it to a new owner. All these transactions are verifiable on the blockchain in perpetuity as the blockchain is a permanent ledger. Programmability also enables more complex use and interactions towards NFTs by actors from the outside world such as owners, sellers, creators, and promoters. These characteristics have wide implications for the industry, such as: Maximum Price A maximum ticket price can be set, even during resales. This feature significantly reduces the incentive to purchase as many tickets as possible at face value and resell them for maximum profit on secondary markets. The problem of tickets selling out from the primary seller and only being available at a much higher price from a secondary intermediary, who in turn takes an additional cut, will be much less likely to occur. Entertainer Revenue on Resales The artists, athletes, creators, and contributors responsible for hosting the event can now benefit from resales in the form of royalties. By programming it in the smart contract, they can take a percentage of each sale. Digital Collectibles The NFT ticket can be collectible and resold as such after the eventmuch like it was during the days of physical tickets. The NFT can also be aesthetically pleasing, functioning like a collectible piece of art. Collaborative competition with multiple organizations utilizing common frames of reference The use of blockchain also allows for a single, non-siloed, highly available source of truth and vast interconnected system. This allows organizations that typically dont work together the chance to collaborate by building and utilizing each others interoperable services. This additional collaboration between organizations allows them to deliver a more comprehensive, holistic experience for the consumer. This forms collaborative competition between companies, because no single monopoly

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Heres Why Blockchain Is Terrible For TicketingIm a firm believer in blockchain and crypto but being a believer doesnt mean I should put my common sense aside.In 2018, I created a startup called 1Krowd to use blockchain for ticketing. I spent over 6 months thinking, tinkering and finding excuses (literally) to use blockchain for my ticketing solution. But all answers led to the same conclusion DO NOT use blockchain. Eventually, we used facial recognition technology instead.I was discouraged, to say the least, as I was so excited about this new Web3 technology. But please allow me to share my findings.Ticketmaster Acquires Blockchain Ticketing Solution UPGRADEDWow, this was amazing news! I thought if Ticketmaster, the worlds largest ticketing company, is acquiring a blockchain startup, there must be a strong validation that blockchain is good for ticketing, right? I even had the right differentiating factor to beat UPGRADED, so I thought.The acquisition was circa 2018 but up to now, no other news came from the startup nor Ticketmaster. In fact, their website has gone bust. One may say it was an acqui-hire. Right, so lets check from 2018 to now to see what else Ticketmaster or their parent Live Nation has been doing with blockchain or NFT.Ticketmaster owner Live Nation partners with blockchain ticketing firm FanDragon TechnologiesFanDragon is the creator of TixTo.Me a blockchain entertainment wallet. The collaboration supposed to offer consumers access to tickets in one secure blockchain wallet. As of now, TixTo.Me and FanDragon websites no longer exist.Heres the news, in case another site goes bust. Credit: LedgerInsightsBlockParty Pivoted to Become NFT MarketplaceAnother early entry into the blockchain ticketing arena is BlockParty. Based in New York, they started with the vision to transform the ticketing world with blockchain by getting rid of ticket scalpers (unscrupulous resellers) and solving counterfeit issues.Today, their business revolves around NFT products NFT marketplace, NFT tools and more.Best Case Study is GET ProtocolGET Protocol which is based in the Netherlands is one of the pioneers in blockchain ticketing. They raised an ICO and begin issuing blockchain-stored tickets for small events in Amsterdam since 2017/18.As of now, they have moved from small to medium-sized events and changed their main business model from a ticketing marketplace to white-label enterprise solution. Which begs the question, why? Running a ticketing marketplace like Ticketmaster is far more lucrative than white-labeling (aka OEM). Otherwise, FAAMG (FB, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google) would have taken the white path. Believe me, Ive done both in my past startups.I never purchased a ticket from GET Protocol but based on my research, they sell tickets of other events via partnerships, meaning not all tickets sold are powered by GET Protocol.They have also moved to using NFT which I think is more fitting for tickets. They could help permanently store customers tickets on chain which usually have some novelty value. I know I kept some of my old concert tickets somewhere. But the caveat is some tickets come with names printed on them so event organizers should be privacy-sensitive over this.Gas Fee is a Big BarrierOne of the biggest issues with blockchain ticketing is gas fee. I dont think I need to elaborate much on this. Imagine the process from buying to using a ticket. There would be at least three transactions purchasing, scanning at the door and burning (to prevent reuse).We can consider moving things off-chain. But if so, why do we use blockchain in the first place?The Need For Speed in TicketingImagine a concert is about to happen at a stadium with 50,000 tickets sold out. During the 2 hours prior to the event, well have thousands of people rushing through a dozen of gates with dozens of tickets being scanned every second, literally! Ive yet to witness firsthand the speed of a blockchain that can achieve high enough TPS (transac

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Americas CEO for SecuTix, the SaaS Ticketing Engagement Platform with blockchain mobile delivery. getty Not that long ago, leaders of many venues thought that fans were not ready or willing to switch to mobile blockchain ticketing. I found this was the case in March 2020. Today, the practice has become more widely adopted. More organizers are turning to blockchain technology for their events. For example, I am the Americas CEO of a company that offers mobile blockchain ticketing, and at a sporting event a few months ago, our technology was used to inject about 1 million tickets into the blockchain for fans in 11 venues across 10 countries. What is important for event organizers to comprehend is that blockchain technology can address four significant challenges in the industry: fake tickets, ticket scalpers and bots, security and data. 1. Fake tickets: Perhaps youve been in this situation: You bought tickets to your favorite show, which is coming to town. The entire family is excited. The day has arrived, you park your car, and, while walking to the venue, you look at the big smile on the face of your kids. You arrive at the entrance, show your tickets, and you are told that, unfortunately, they are fake. This has happened to many people. Mobile blockchain ticketing can help prevent this in the future. Each ticket going through the blockchain receives its own identity, and if consumers want to resell or transfer the ticket, they need to go again through the blockchain. 2. Scalpers and automated bots: One of my favorite artists was coming to South Florida. The organizer was opening the online sales at 10 a.m. sharp on a Friday. At 9:55 a.m., I was ready in front of my computer. At 10:01 a.m. when I clicked Buy tickets, the only tickets left were in the back of the venue, or I could already buy better tickets at outrageous prices on a reseller marketplace. Bots have presented a serious challenge for the industry. Mobile blockchain ticketing can help block the bots, and the event organizer can define the rules around which tickets can be resold. 3. Security: The bad guys have not retired. Even if this topic was left on the back burner in the last couple years, the need to secure venues is as important as it was before. Additionally, venues may now need to include the capability to check a vaccine pass or whatever security measures a venue decides to implement in the future. Mobile blockchain ticketing allows organizers to identify their patrons precisely, even if a ticket has been exchanged five minutes before entering. 4. Data: Who is not tired of receiving email blasts with dozens of events they have zero interest in attending? I think that more than ever, it is crucial for organizers and venues to understand their audience better, to tailor specific offers that would resonate with them, to create new and more qualified leads, and, last but certainly not least, to design a more attractive customer journey. It can be almost impossible for anyone to do so if they dont own their data and if they are not able to analyze it. This is another application of mobile blockchain ticketing. Getting Started From insurances companies, financial institutions and watchmakers, to precious stones, telecommunications, computer hardware and so many more, it seems that every industry is being impacted by blockchain technology. The events industry is no different. If you start by examining customer needs, as outlined above, you may realize the potential for the events organizers to use blockchain. Now, you might not be familiar with the technology and, quite frankly, might be wondering how to make good use of it and where to start. I like to compare it to driving a car: I dont need to understand how the engine works, but I understand how to drive the car and get to where I want. So, the first step for any event organizer is to select a company that is able to answer your needs with mobile blockchain ticketing. (Disclosure: My company helps with mobil

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