Connor McGregor Vs. Floyd Mayweather has proven to be one of the most highly anticipated events of 2017, understandable given the caliber of the fighters and the fact that this will be the first Boxing UFC crossover fight in history. As expected with an event of this magnitude, tickets are extraordinarily expensive, starting from $2,500.00 and going as high as $10,000.00 on Ticketmaster. With that being said, these prices pale in comparison to the prices being charged on secondary markets, in fact, tickets for the McGregor Vs. Mayweather fight are already amongst the highest-selling tickets in the history of the secondary market.

Tickets were being sold on secondary market platforms such as StubHub and Seatgeek for up to $150,000.00 representing a 5,900% increase from the original face value of the primary market tickets. So far, the most expensive ticket sold on StubHub for this event was sold for $55,830.00 for third row floor seats; there are also still ringside seats available for those willing to part with $80,200.00.

Unfortunately these exorbitant price increases are an all-too-familiar sight for event attendees. When a high-profile event such as Connor McGregor Vs. Floyd Mayweather is announced, bulk-buying bots, ticket resellers, and brokers rush to purchase tickets as quickly as possible on primary markets. Even worse, sometimes promoters and other parties involved in the event take their allocations of tickets directly to the secondary market and keep the increased revenue all to themselves. They do this with the expectation that they will be able to resell those tickets for inflated prices on secondary markets and take these margins as their revenue. Despite numerous attempts to regulate the secondary market, either through legislative practices or technological solutions, the secondary market continues to operate in such a way that fans and artists alike are taken advantage of.

The Aventus team worked hard to find a solution to this problem. Aventus allows event organisers to control the entire lifecycle of tickets, from dynamic pricing in the primary market, to allowing for dynamic pricing caps and revenue percentages on secondary markets, to the distribution of funds at the end of the event. With Aventus, black markets are eliminated so individuals cannot circumvent the rules set by the event organisers in the first place. We do this in two ways:

We create an anonymous secondary market, so resellers do not know who they are selling to. This stops off-chain transactions from occurring where, for example, a seller only lists his ticket once he has received an extra off-chain monetary compensation. We associate some sort of identity with a ticket, so that people cannot sell their private keys. Some people try and use phones to stop this problem, but in events like this where the resale prices are thousands of dollars, its easy enough to buy a cheap $50 smart phone and sell that for the ticket. This identity can be in the form of an ID, credit card, a voice recording, a Facebook profile picture, etc, depending on how strict the use case.

Please note: we understand that for small events, its a real pain if you have to show ID every time. That is why we allow event organisers to switch these features on and off modularly depending on the ticket category and the event they are currently organising. For this fight, for example, since the ringside seats are being speculated on the most, these would have the highest degree of identity check: a manual ID or facial recognition, for example. However, the seats at the very back that have a significantly lower secondary market presence could simply use a mobile phone identifier.

Under the current paradigm, the only entities that derive revenue from secondary market ticket sales are the ticket seller and the platform through which the ticket is sold. However, Aventus promotes the equitable distribution of revenue; we enable the event organisers to derive revenue from the secondary market, and even split this revenue between the venue, talent, promoters, etc, all in a transparent and secure manner.