Most fans enjoy the experience of listening to their favorite band or watching their favorite sports team play live, but that same joy doesn’t always extend to the venue’s ticketing process...
Most fans enjoy the experience of listening to their favorite band or watching their favorite sports team play live, but that same joy doesn’t always extend to the venue’s ticketing process. Fraudsters and malicious scalpers, who buy up massive quantities of tickets to resell them at inflated prices, can sow distrust and skepticism among fans looking to purchase tickets. As a result, fans may find it difficult to obtain authentic tickets from primary and secondary sellers. Not to mention various legal frameworks that forbid ticket resale among private citizens, also known as scalping.
Venues too are left with their own headaches from managing ticketed events. Venues can range from coffee shops to sold-out mega-arenas, and each venue requires a service that provides ticketing verification at some level. Venues have to choose between the demands of large and powerful ticketing providers or cheaper and less secure options for ticketing. Ticket providers like StubHub, Eventbrite, and Ticketmaster each have different value propositions to serve all of these use cases.
The variability in security around ticket authentication creates opportunities for ticket counterfeiters and scammers to do what they do best, extract value from the venues, artists, sports teams, and fans.
Enter NFTs for tickets
Without portraying blockchain technology as some ultimate panacea, NFTs are actually very well-suited for disrupting or enhancing live event ticketing. Emerging companies like tokenproof and Ethpass are already addressing these problems head-on by providing simple solutions for gated ticketing and verification.
tokenproof’s mobile app for iOS and Android allows scanning and verification for NFTs using a simple QR code. We recently announced our partnership with tokenproof to enable brands to generate impactful experiences using NFTs to gate exclusive events. The integration will allow brands to deliver NFTs on the Flow blockchain that can be used as live event tickets, discounts at the POS, or as a perk pass to redeem in-person merchandise.
Here are a couple of examples of brands already utilizing the tokenproof integration on Gigantik:
RaceDay NFT, an NFT marketplace for race fans, piloted the integration for the NASCAR Cup Series Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 500 at Texas Motor Speedway on Sunday.