Fraudulent ticket resellers may finally meet their match. The Aventus Protocol, an open-source platform built on the Ethereum network, is designed to combat counterfeit tickets and ticket scalping by allowing event organizers to build decentralized applications that manage the ticketing supply chain.
Aventus has partnered with BlocSide Sports, a new digital platform that handles mobile ticketing and uses a suite of tools to increase fan engagement.
The game plan is to succeed where big music artists like Ed Sheeran, Chance the Rapper, Radiohead and Adele have struggled. Annihilate the scalpers.
Reports CBC, “In 2009, two Canadian law firms launched a class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster for allegedly ‘conspiring’ to divert fans to its own resale site, TicketsNow. Springsteen said he and the band were ‘furious’ that tickets had been marked up by hundreds of dollars on TicketsNow. Ticketmaster didn’t admit liability but settled the suit for $36 per ticket.”
In 2015 New York’s attorney general investigated the “speculative” sale of sky-high tickets for Bruce Springsteen’s 2016 tour when tickets became available on StubHub, TicketNetwork and Vivid Seats before tickets for the event were officially on sale.
The report recommended:
Ticket resale platforms are in the best position to ensure that their broker customers follow the law, and they must take meaningful steps to do so. Specifically, these platforms should require that brokers provide their New York license numbers as a condition of using the resale platform, and disclose to potential customers the face value of tickets they are offering for sale, as already required by New York law.
Blockchain makes these measures unnecessary. It amplifies the spirit of the law and the eventual passage of the Better Online Ticket Sales Act of 2016 or the BOTS Act of 2016, which has banned bots from snatching up scores of tickets before fans ever have a chance. It can also enforce laws that prohibit the resale of tickets that are labeled “untransferable” or show a ticket buyer’s name.
Despite federal and state laws, however, bots can still operate and brokers can still resell tickets for a hefty premium.
For blockchain enthusiasts, sorting out the lucrative business of ticket price manipulation and fraud is a near-perfect use case of the technology. It allows each ticket sold to be immutably linked to a single identity. Instead of event organizers losing control as tickets fall into the hands of individuals and companies that flip tickets for quick profits, they can monitor a record of actual ticket holders.
Blockchain will soon face off against ticket resellers when the Aventus Protocol is tested in its first large-scale application: the sale and tracking of roughly 10,000 tickets to 2018 FIFA World Cup fan events around Europe and the US. Aventus permits the rights holder to set indisputable rules that determine how ticket ownership may be sold and resold.
We are extremely excited to be the first to test @AventusPF source-code during the @FIFAWorldCup! This is a huge step in #football towards eliminating #ticketing fraud! https://t.co/2nYRswyT1R
— BlocSide Sports (@BlocSide_Sports) May 4, 2018
Full functionality promises a smart ticketing ecosystem:
Control over the supply chain
- Create ‘rules-based’ tickets that the ticketing supply chain must adhere to even after tickets leave inventory
- Choose which businesses in the supply-chain can interact with inventory
- Define pricing levels on resale, and derive revenue, no matter who facilitates the sale
Control over ticket provenance
- Sales data is private: an obscured audit trail of ownership transfers persists on the blockchain
- Audit trail can be combined with internally-held user data to monitor how many times a ticket has changed hands, which owner redeemed it, and which marketplace(s) facilitated ticket resales and when
- Completely prevent counterfeit tickets
