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Two new ticketers join the blockchain party

Shiv Madan's Blockparty and Monero-backed Tari join firms such as Aventus, Guts and Crypto.tickets aiming to revolutionise ticketing using the distributed-ledger tech

By IQ on 24 May 2018

Elements Lakewood music festival

Blockparty will launch at Elements Lakewood


image © Elements Lakewood Music Festival

The co-founder of Ticketfly and a former NME exec are among the latest music biz figures to throw their hats into the ring of the increasingly congested blockchain ticketing sector.

Blockparty is led by Shiv Madan, formerly of NME.com, eBay, Lehman Brothers and wearable data start-up Ability, and launched at leading blockchain/cryptocurrency conference Consensus earlier this month. It aims to use the blockchain – a distributed ledger which permanently stores all transactions – to eliminate problems in ticketing, including fraud and bulk-buying by bots.

Madan comments: “Eventgoers are rightfully frustrated with the current landscape of the ticket purchasing experience. We’ve all been there: after spending months saving up for a ticket to a concert or sports match, you furiously type in a captcha on a ticketing site, desperate to get great seats – only to find out that all tickets are sold out and have magically re-appeared, within minutes, on a reseller site for five times the original price.

“With Blockparty, we’re reshaping the event ticketing industry to improve the purchasing experience, eliminate reseller exploitation and give power back to the people.”

The Blockparty mobile app will beta-launch at Elements Lakewood Music Festival in Pennsylvania this weekend (25–27 May).

“With Blockparty, we’re reshaping the event ticketing industry”

Also new to the blockchain party is Tari, the brainchild of Ticketfly co-founder Dan Teree, angel investor Naveen Jain and Riccardo ‘Fluffypony’ Spagni, the lead maintainer of privacy-orientated cryptocurrency Monero.

According to Fortune, Tari-issued tickets will be “tracked and logged on a new, to-be-developed blockchain, also called Tari, complete with its own native, as-yet-unreleased cryptocurrency, dubbed ‘Tari tokens’. The team also aspires to create a marketplace beyond tickets to cover all sorts of digital goods, including loyalty points, virtual currencies and in-game items.

During Consensus COO Teree told the magazine that blockchain can solve the problem of “economic leakage”, where middlemen reap the revenue from the resale of virtual goods, such as tickets. He said Tari will be designed to help compensate original “owners”, like artists, sports teams, event promoters and other parties.

Other ticketing platforms building their infrastructure on blockchain technology include Crypto.tickets, Aventus, Guts Tickets, China’s Baidu and the recently launched BitTicket by Citizen Ticket.

For a primer on blockchain and how it can be effectively utilised for ticket sales, see IQ’s recent primer, written by Lyubomyr Nykyforuk of Softjourn:

How the worlds of ticketing and blockchain intersect

 


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