Technology

Posted on November 29, 2017 by staff

It takes GUTS to tackle ticket touts through blockchain

Technology

A Dutch blockchain start-up called GUTS is on a mission to make exorbitant ticket tout prices and ticket fraud a thing of the past.

Backed by key players in the music industry, GUTS – full name the Guaranteed Unique Ticketing System – is able to register ownership of SMART tickets, making it impossible to re-sell tickets illegally, or at a higher price.

This means no more extortionate prices for secondary tickets with all revenue returned to artists and producers.

The UK music industry is rife with ticket touts and third-party resellers purchasing tickets in bulk, and reselling for double or triple the original price. In the past year alone, tickets for Ed Sheeran’s Teenage Cancer Trust gig were sold for up to £5,000, while an £85 ticket to see Adele at the O2 was reportedly sold for £24,840.

The scale of the problem has also been highlighted by a recent report by Fanfair Alliance, the UK campaign against industrial-scale online ticket touting. The research found that 80 per cent of the British public think the UK secondary ticketing market – valued at £1 billion – is a “rip off”.

To ensure a transparent and decentralised event ticketing market for all parties, GUTS has launched a blockchain-based event ticketing protocol, the Guaranteed Entrance Token (GET). GET is built upon the Ethereum blockchain and will facilitate the sale of event tickets by issuing SMART tickets to wallet addresses on the blockchain.

Within the GUTS ticketing ecosystem, GET tokens are required for the creation and trading of SMART tickets – without GET, event organisers cannot create events or issue SMART tickets, nor can they change the state of a contract, therefore making ticket fraud and touting impossible.

This protocol will ensure a transparent and decentralised event-ticketing market that promotes ‘honest ticketing’.

“Over 30 per cent of all tickets are resold with mark-ups between 30 per cent and 700 per cent and these inflated prices are an ongoing problem for artists and their fans,” said GUTS Tickets CEO and co-founder Maarten Bloemers (pictured below).

“We believe in fair ticket prices for all, and the GET token is an important first step towards eliminating the fraudulent side of the secondary ticket-market.”

As well as using the new token on its own platform, GUTS has launched an ICO that will enable other event organisers and ticketing companies to make use of the GET-protocol through its open source infrastructure and scale GUTS’ innovative blockchain-based ecosystem.

Through this ICO, GUTS tickets is looking to facilitate a true revolution in the ticketing industry by creating the first ‘smart event’ ecosystem in the world and with a target of $17.5m, the ICO will help extend the impact of the product to new audiences worldwide.

The ICO, which launched on 15 November, will run for 28 days, closing on 13th December. The aim of the ICO is to sell 37 million GET tokens, which will be exchanged for Ether (ETH) on the blockchain.