⛰️Background
TLDR: The event industry has a huge potential, and also challenges. There's an endless battle for ticket scalping, fraud, and scams. Another issue is about the continuous engagement and mechanism for controllable and verifiable transfer for the ticket if somehow the holder wants to resell it. Blockchain and NFT technology could solve it. But on a practical level, there is still a lot to work on.
A Glimpse of the Events Industry
Why Human Making Events
Humans have always been a social creature. Since time immemorial, humans have thrived in communities, finding solace, joy, and purpose in the bonds we forge with one another. We're social creatures at heart (yes, even if you self-classify yourself as an introvert), constantly seeking opportunities to come together and mark important moments in our lives. Whether it's a small gathering among friends or a grand festival in a bustling city, events have always played a central role in our shared human experience.
Throughout history, humans have marked significant milestones and moments with rituals and gatherings. From ancient ceremonies honoring deities to medieval festivals celebrating harvests, events have served as focal points for some meanings, be it community bonding, cultural expression, or even Tinder-like matchmaking events. For example, Cleopatra allegedly hosted events to attract potential lovers. So blind date is not new, everyone.
Apart from there's no internet and Tinder back in those days, these kind of event are proof that humans throughout history seeking out enjoyment in gathering and socializing with others. These gatherings provided not only a sense of belonging but also an opportunity for individuals to reaffirm their identity within the collective whole.
The Rise of Events Industry
Today, the event industry shows just how inventive and imaginative humans can be. What started as casual get-togethers among friends has evolved into something much bigger. At the heart of this evolution lies the intersection of social value and economic opportunity. Now, events are not just about personal celebrations; they're also big business, blurring the lines between private parties and commercial ventures. From bustling exhibitions to grand music festival, events became integral to the economic fabric of societies, driving tourism, stimulating local businesses, and fueling innovation. The industry grow exponentially, maybe more than Cleopatra could imagine when she pioneering the matchmaking events. According to Statista, in 2022 there are 43.644 concerts and festival globally with total revenue touching $13,49 billion. This figure is from concerts only, and it shows us the scale and the promises of the industry.
But when you attend a conference, concert, or convention, there's more to it than meets the eye. Behind the scenes, there's a bustling world of planning, organizing, and promoting to ensure these events leave a lasting impression. And one crucial aspect of this behind-the-scenes hustle is ticketing. Whether it's securing your spot at a popular music festival or reserving a seat at a must-see industry conference, ticketing plays a vital role in making these events accessible to attendees. It's not just about showing up; it's about navigating the ticketing process, finding the best deals, and ensuring you don't miss out on the experience of a lifetime.
Event Organizer Headaches
AlsoMoreover, planning the ticketing process effectively is crucial for the success of any event. Event organizers must anticipate demand, set reasonable prices, and implement measures to prevent ticket scalping and fraud. Even with technology in the mix, scalping and fraud still give event organizers headaches. See, some ticketing systems store all the data in one place, making them easy targets for hackers. These hackers can mess with ticket numbers or make fake ones, messing up the whole event vibe. Plus, there's not always a good way to stop people from reselling tickets for crazy prices on other websites. Also, cases of selling fraud tickets is a normal phenomenon these days. So, even though you might think buying tickets online would make things easier, it can still lead to a lot of shady business. And that's a big challenge for event organizers or planners who just want everyone to have a fair shot at enjoying the show.
Those headaches could be solved by the rise of blockchain technology, especially utilizing the NFT technology. NFT is a form of technology that is built on top of a blockchain, which can't be tampered with. At a glance, this technology is a perfect match to battle the issues with ticketing. But if we dig a bit more into the implementation level, utilizing the technology itself to solve the problems is still a puzzling challenge. For example, implementing NFT as it is to be recognized as tickets in events is not ideal. Why? Because it still could lead to #double entry. Imagine a holder of a particular NFT showed up in an event and got in by showing the NFT. In the venue, the holder could still pass their private key to any parties outside the venue, and that party could get in using the same NFT. This is one of the problems when using NFT as ticket without considering the real-world mechanism of the solution.
NFT, True Savior for Event?
The funny thing is the NFT is not even on the blockchain — it’s just a URL to the JPEG. - Elon Musk
So many NFT community furious and possibly offended by Musk's statement back then. But sadly, what Musk's said is true. On a technical level, NFT is a unique tokenized asset of URL that points out to a certain asset outside of the blockchain. Some people argue that if the assets are stored in a decentralized-like system, for example IPFS, it is still 'forgivable'. But anyhow, we won't get into the debatable notion of it. What we want to point out is that the NFTs with all of its property, apart from trading, could still be utilized for real-world use cases. One of the use cases is the ticketing system in the event industry. But before we dive into the use case, let's take a detour of how the NFT world works by breaking down the POV from every stakeholder (excluding the marketplace).
NFT Project Owner
NFT project owner is a person or a party/parties that initiated the project. They usually consist of a typical tech team trio: a hustler, a designer, and a hacker. A hustler is a person or a party that has a vision and idea of how the project will be. Hustler will also act as other functions, basically minimal or non-tech related such as project manager, business development, marketing, and other functions. A designer and hacker, as technical parties, usually have their role specified to their specialty. A designer is basically in charge of brand identity, the user experience, the customer persona, and other related to, well, design things. A hacker in this term is not actually the people who breached other people's servers, but programmers who build the tech product, such as smart contracts, websites, Dapps, and other geeky things. These trio will work with each other to make sure the project delivers to its holder, and to sell NFT as much as they can.
The business model in the NFT project part is simple, they produce the NFT, sell it, and get the royalties automatically from secondary market activities (thanks to blockchain technology). There are various approaches to how a project owner sells the 'value' of their NFT, some of them are offering the value of art that is in the image of the NFT, some others sell it for use cases like charity or hobby, and some other offer utilization of their NFT in some digital activities such as metaverse or gaming. After the owner of the project sells all of the NFTs, they will manage the community in the hope of future retention activities, in which the project owner usually makes another project or series of NFTs to be sold again to their community and also to others, outside of the community. This continuation of activities and fostering community depends on the project owner itself, especially in terms of economic terms. To find a project that is not continuable and not sustainable is not a few. Many things cause that phenomenon, and we believe one of the things is the lack of publicly available tools for the project owner to utilize their NFT in real-world use cases.
NFT Holder
We classified the second stakeholder as an NFT holder. This persona is a true believer of the NFT project. Holders will buy the NFT because of the vision and intrinsic value of the project. Be it believing in the vision, the promises, or even in the project owner. The NFT holder is usually active in the community itself and puts concern on the ongoing project and its cause. It is not rare that the holders are the gear to the community, even when they are not the initial founder/owner of the project.
NFT Scalper
The third stakeholder is the NFT scalper. We believe this kind of persona exists (if not the biggest) in the NFT ecosystem. They are more likely economic pursuers, shifting from one project to another just for the money. Usually, they won't be hesitant to sell their NFT if the price match with what they desire, without considering the value or vision of the NFT project. This kind of persona is still beneficial for the project owner, event though they are not the true believer. In terms of an economic perspective, NFTs that are sold in the secondary market still contribute to the owner's pocket via the royalty fees. In terms of expanding the holder/buyer, the scalper helps the late believer or even the other scalper to get the NFTs.
NFT Renter
The fourth stakeholder is the NFT Renter. This kind of renting activity rose when the ERC-4097 smart contract standard was passed on to the Ethereum community. Despite the standard and the use case is still new, some platforms already utilize it. Some platform offers economic returns for holding NFT for a certain time, thus hopefully boosting up the activities of renting for users. Some other utilizes for attending exclusive events digitally for a certain NFT.
Integrating the NFT Ecosystem with Real-World Utilities
Existing NFT communities would interact with real-world utilities in their own way, paving the use of their NFT as best as they can, collaborating with some party in the real world that is eager to embrace the community. In another way, when some real-world parties want to embrace the vastly wide Web 3 community, they have to choose which one of the communities suits their values or goals. Later, they have to compromise with the technical aspect that separates the communities themselves. For example, one community is in the Ethereum ecosystem, and the other is in the Polkadot. To embrace all of them might be possible, but it requires tons of workaround behind the desk. But even if they solved that, the real question is how could they do that?
Making Tickets as NFT, why not?
Some parties try to solve the ticketing problem by minting the tickets for events as NFT. This approach is great, in the sense that utilizing the characteristics of NFT so that there will be no more scams and fraud. But it missing something so valuable in terms of Web 3: community. By minting tickets as NFT, it will surely gather around the people who want to attend the event. But even so, it's not like creating a community in a Web 3 spirit. The event in the real world may or may not gather around people with the same values or ideas. Thus it is debatable to jump to the conclusion that the approach will do the same as the approach that started in the Web 3 community, in this case, NFT projects. Building a community in a Web 3 project is more likely to create a tighter bond than the one that started in a real-world event, arguably.
NFT as Tickets, then!
As we said in the early of this article, there's challenging work to utilize NFT in real-world use cases. On top of that, there are minimum to no public tools at all that could be used both by the real-world party and also the NFT community to collaborate. This is the basis of why we build ENTRI, a tool for both the NFT community and also real-world stakeholders to collaborate and exchange their values.
ENTRI utilizes any NFT (be it already circulating or not), as tickets. Not the other way around. We believe the utilization should always start with the community movement in Web 3 spirit, so we build the utilization tools for it to flourish.
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