Update December ‘18

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get your fix of monthly update.

It’s the final update of 2018 — a year that brought both GUTS Tickets and GET Protocol lots of growth, adoption and new prospects for the road ahead.

First things first

This month marked the second buyback of the GET Protocol, on the 27th of December. After the first buyback worth €30.000 of GET, the complete workings of GET Protocol have taken shape, which generated a lot of interest for the ones to follow. As stated in the November blog, we weren’t sure whether the buyback was going to take place in 2018, because several sales were still pending and might be postponed until 2019. Although this has indeed been the case, we have decided to conduct the buyback anyway, resulting in a significantly lower demand this time around.

The reasons for this decision was simple; we want to set up a dependable and transparent system, rather than spin the numbers and create an inconsistent flow within the protocol in order to create hype. Or, as Kasper put it more eloquently in his blog about the BB:

‘In the long run, we see more value in establishing a periodic and consistent stream of demand created by the buybacks over an irregular and opportunistic timed scheduling of buybacks. Demand consistency will create an asset that has a clear fundamental value based on predictable supply, demand, and velocity. Whereas the irregular scheduling of buybacks will create uncertainty, volatility, and unmanageable speculation.’

The buy-back was conducted on Thursday, December 27th. In accordance with our ambition of streamlining a regularly occurring and transparently conducted buyback, you can already set your alarm clocks for the next one:

Mark your calendars.

Business update

1.) Saving the world, one ticket at a time

To coincide with the Holiday spirit, GUTS launched its new Dynamic Pricing feature. This enables the artists and event organizers to not only securely sell their tickets, but also generate a substantial flow of funds to the charities of their choice. We took the opportunity to create some diagrams, which help explain the basic workings of this feature:

The current situation

Currently, fans pay exuberant amounts of money to scalpers in order to receive tickets that might very well be fake. Their frustration is aimed at the artist and event organizer, who enable scalpers to make a profit from their ticket sales.

Working with GUTS Tickets

Fans now receive their verifiably legitimate tickets for the exact price that was quoted. If they have chosen to purchase a dynamically priced charity ticket, all of the money paid above the originally quoted price now goes to a charity of the artists choosing. All transactions are securely registered and completely transparent. The scalper is effectively cut out and left out in the cold.

We will of course keep you updated with the developments and usage of this feature!

2.) Who’s laughing now?

This month comedian Patrick Laureij announced new shows for his ‘Nederlands Hoop’ tour, which was already sold out due to a huge demand. Of this new batch of shows, twelve are ticketed by GUTS Tickets — a first time for Patrick’s shows. In the past, the young comedian has publicly voiced his frustrations about the current workings of the ticketing system, with fans often coming to him directly to complain about having to overpay for tickets.

Those headaches will be over soon, Patrick.

At the time of this writing over a hundred of Patrick’s shows are listed by TopTicketShop, charging over 350% of the original ticket price. None of the events ticketed by GUTS are among them, of course, and this will hopefully prove to Patrick — and his fans — that the time of scalping and dishonest ticketing is over. Tickets to his GUTS-shows can be found here.

3.) Advisors be advisin’

This month we also got to catch up with some of our advisors to take stock on how things are going and plot the next steps in world domination. CEO Maarten and CCO Tom went to London to, amongst other things, meet up with Chris Payne, agent at ITB. (You might know some of their artists; Adele, Maroon 5, Bob Dylan…) Chris shared insights into the state of the international music business and initiated meetings with some O.G.’s in the music scene.

Also, our business developer Sander got together with Watse de Jong for a meeting or two. You might know Watse as that jet-setting Dutch guy from the EDM scene that’s always at the craziest events. Oh yeah, and he also manages this guy:

On the left: It’s the #1 DJ of the world: Martin Garrix. On the right: He plays guitar and ‘sings a little’, but has given up his musical dreams to get into crypto; it’s our business developer Sander. Despite Sander’s repeated efforts, Watse only manages the guy on the left.

Besides laying down some sick tracks (is that how the kids say it?) with Mr. Garrix, Sander and Watse discussed the possibilities for the future and the international strategy for the time to come.

4.) Tic(ket)Tag

On the more techy side of things, we have had several very promising and substantial meetings with the good folks at TicTag. Together we are working on some pretty cool stuff, which we will reveal in due time. For now, you can check out what they are about in this video:

Tech update:

A few updates from Dev-town:

We have worked out the basics of the ticketsharing functionalities;

In the backend; we are now using docker in production (containerized). This allows for easier, better reproducible deployments, which along with the new infra, allows for easier horizontal scaling;

There has also been a significant advancement in the processing of ‘upsells’ (champagne, parking tickets, dvd’s) that are sold alongside tickets. This functionality has been streamlined greatly, which makes it easier for the consumer to choose the ticket of their liking, but also takes a considerably lower toll on the performance of our system.

Alright, back to the future

With the end of the year approaching, the impulse arises to reflect on the year that has passed and also to look ahead. What better way to do this, than with something to actually look at? Like a video? Right?!!

Some last things…

Our community member Krijn has written a book(!) on cryptocurrencies. It’s available online here (it’s in Dutch unfortunately — think global Krijn!). Kidding aside, this is of course very awesome and we blindly nominate Krijn for the Nobel Prize for this literary achievement.

We had a great Holiday dinner at the office. Apparently a lot of crazy stuff happened until deep in the night, but no one seems to remember what exactly. Either way it was fun to sit down together with the entire (huge!) team and enjoy some delicious food and great wine. Here’s a picture from when things were still fairly calm:

And with that we wrap up the December blog. We hope you have a wonderful holiday period and a bullish 2019. Or, in other words: