GET & Statebox — Scalable blockchain tickets for the masses
By: Kasper Keunen
Tags: Scalability, Ethereum, Ticketing System, Tokenization, Blockchain

The GET Protocol is all about making the ticketing industry more transparent and accountable. By for example by making data points about the ticket trade on the primary and secondary market accountable for the public. Together with our partner Statebox we developed a process that accomplishes just that. In this blog, I will explain what this first of its category, scalable blockchain ticketing approach exactly entails.

On Friday the 7th of June at 10:00 sharp the largest blockchain powered ticket sale to date will embark. The tickets for 2 shows in the Philps Stadium Eindhoven(capacity 30 000+) will go up for sale. Over the course of a full year, we expect to sell and resell all the tickets for these 2 events via the GET Protocol and Statebox API.

For more information and details about this specific sale itself, check out the organizer’s official channels or those of the ticketing company servicing the ticket sale: GUTS Tickets. In the remainder of this blog, the role of the GET Protocol in this ticket sale will have center stage.

What makes the ticketing of this event different?

With the help of the GET Protocol, GUTS Tickets makes a stance against resale and ticket fraud in the ticketing market. In a nutshell, this means that every step in the lifecycle of a ticket is made publically accountable and traceable via a technology called blockchain.

For those interested in the nuts and bolts of the implementation, rest assured. The Statebox powered ticket explorer will be the first repository of the GET Protocol that will be fully open sourced. Following this, the repositories of other components of the GET ticketing system will be made public. Until we created a fully open, inclusive and transparent ticketing system fueled by its native token GET.

Why is transparency needed in ticketing?

If you are more interested in the ‘why’ question I recommend the blog linked below.

Without a doubt a great blog Kasper. But, as anybody with basic knowledge about blockchain will be able to tell you, is that blockchain technology isn’t really known for its ability to get a lot of stuff done. Processing large amounts of data in a secure and most of all in a cost-efficient manner is a challenge. Fully agreed! I personally agree and actually believe on-chain scaling will remain a problem in the future. The inherent added complexity of on an immutable ledger and trustless consensus conflict with processing efficiency on a fundamental level. A point this blog drives home.

This is all a nerdy way of saying that it is generally easier to make to a decision alone as opposed to making this decision with a group of possibly malicious and anonymous people on the interwebz. YouTube explainer video about Blockchain technology.

The experience-driven conclusion, that using blockchain ‘out of the box’ is unpractical, we learned ‘the hard way’ during a real-world ticket sale in the tail end of 2017. Read more about this experience in this blog:

Note: Of course it was not only this experience that made us decide to make our blockchain registration ‘smarter’. Execution cost and the limited capability to store any sort of event/ticket meta-data on-chain also posed big motivators to seek a more fitting technology to provide tickets and events with the much needed accountability.

After improving the Ethereum runner ability to register tickets in pulses we used this improved ‘real-time’ blockchain registration of all ticket trades on the GET Protocol during the majority of 2018. See one of the transaction runners here: ETHERSCAN LINK TO 122 000 tx registrations.