Last year we published a blog post in which we announced our deal with Hekwerk and the role as the first of GUTS Tickets launching partners. At the time we emphasized about the significance of this deal, after all, Hekwerk represents 20+ of the Netherlands’ most well-known artists and comedians. The company is considered to be a crucial partner in getting our spot at the table where decisions are made by large venues and festivals. As of today we can conclude the significance of this deal with Hekwerk was not overstated.

Example of a theater seating map of the GUTS Tickets application. A seating optimization algorithm places all sold tickets in the according ranks 24 hours before a show starts and communicates/pushes the individual placing to the ticket holders via the dynamic web application. This ensures that even if you have bought a ticket on secondary market you will most likely be sitting next together with the group you are attending the event with!

We are proud to announce that in 2018 we'll be ticketing more than +50.000 tickets for +75 events. The GUTS ticketing application and the GET Protocol back end will be used for shows from several of their largest artists. These shows will occur in well over 10 large Dutch theaters spread all over the Netherlands.

TLDR:

Selling 50.000 tickets means the creation of minimally 25.000 Ethereum wallet addresses assigned to the smart tickets accounts/owners.

These ticket buyers are mainstream consumers that will not be aware they just became owner of a smart Ethereum wallet/address. Neither should they , the address is used in the back end to register ownership and regulate secondary ticket trade. All relevant state changes by the event-contract are made transparent and can be followed on the blockchain.

, the address is used in the back end to register ownership and regulate secondary ticket trade. All relevant state changes by the event-contract are made transparent and can be followed on the blockchain. All smart ticket wallets will be assigned a certain amount of GET as soon as the protocol is able to lock in a FIAT amount per event cycle. More on how and when the first GET buy-backs will occur in a future road map post!

Having the smart ticketing application used by 10+ large theaters(i.e capacity minimally 800, up until 1800) will give GUTS/GET the opportunity to showcase our tech and stress-test our assumptions.

Experience the future of paper-less smart ticketing in our Sandbox environment.

A lot of impressions to ace

As a team we are quite excited to make it happen and ensure all goes well and the feedback of the last pilot events are well implemented and satisfy Hekwerks needs and the suggested improvements and functionalities are to their standard. Scaling up to 10+ different venues also means 10+ different floor plans to integrate. 10+ different front-points will intensively be using and interacting with the organizer dashboard. This means that a lot of new dashboard functionalities will have to be built and tested to guarantee that these venues GET a great impression of how smart ticketing works. After all..

First impressions can only be made once

We are going to make sure we leave a great first impression.

It is very important to point out that not only Hekwerk needs to be impressed by what we deliver but the theater using the smart ticketing system for the first time should be equally impressed. As a matter of fact, theaters might not have the dazzle or flair commonly associated with large music festivals like Tomorrowland (organized once a year, 185k attendees), but large theaters sell more than twice that amount of tickets per year.

Only scale when you are scalable

I am not saying GUTS/GET doesn’t aspire to do the ticketing for large music festivals or sporting events. The only thing I want to point out is that in order to on-board these big events you'll need an application that is battle tested. If scaling by a factor x1000 in event size results in an increase in support tickets by the same factor you're in for some trouble (i.e. high costs, complaints).

Crypto for the masses

If someone would ask me what defines this project from other smart ticketing projects in the crypto space or even from other tokens in general my answer is always pretty much the same:

GUTS Tickets is taking the blockchain based GET Protocol live and in the hands of tens of thousands mainstream consumers in 2018. No projections, promises or speculation but actual client driven token turnover. The first batch of GET will be bought back from the open market by event organizers in 2018, as these tokens will be needed to use the smart ticketing protocol.

Several of the core value adding elements of our solution against ticket scalping that are described in our whitepaper are fully developed and operational (check out Sandbox environment for yourself and buy a free ticket). As such a great deal of time and resources have been spent networking the industry and deploying a solid acquisition/sales strategy which resulted in real-world (i.e. non-crypto) partnerships and organizers, these commercial/professional companies acknowledge the benefits for our solution and are willing to pay for the additonal functions we have to offer. Market validation is best kind of validation after all!

We'll keep you in the loop!

Our team in Amsterdam is growing. As of the new year we have moved to a larger office, we'll show you around soon. Several new employees have already joined the team here in Amsterdam and more are planned to join our ranks in upcoming weeks. With a bigger team we are better capable to address tasks/requests on all fronts; being it adding functionalities the dashboard, adding events, protocol development and exchange listing/planning.

We haven't found the time yet to introduce the community to these new team members as well. But not to worry, I will not rob you of the opportunity to meet these awesome anti-scalping unicorns, I'll get to it soon enough!