Your favourite artist is coming to town; you’ve been waiting for a chance to see them live for months. You wait by the computer for the exact moment that tickets are made available for sale only to be told, “you’re in line.” 5 minutes later, you’re still in line, and the tickets are sold out. Sound familiar?

Adele fans are certainly familiar with this problem. During her Finale tour, tickets for the Wembley Stadium locations were sold out within minutes leaving the majority of her fans unable to purchase tickets. Unfortunately bots and resellers purchased the majority of these tickets who then placed these tickets on secondary resale sites like StubHub and Viagogo. To make matters worse, these tickets, which were being sold at a maximum face value of £175.00, were now being sold for £9,000.00 — £25,000.00.

Tweets showing dismay about the Adele ticket prices.

You might be asking yourself why this is still a problem? After all this isn’t a new issue, fans have been dealing with scalpers/touters for decades. Well there are a few reasons. First and foremost, despite multiple legislative attempts to regulate the secondary market (CRA and BOTS Act), none have proven effective at curbing the secondary ticket market due to lack of any type of enforcement mechanism.

Secondly, primary and secondary distributors are actually incentivized to maintain this paradigm. Primary distributors derive their revenue from fees associated with the sale of tickets. Whether bots, resellers, or fans purchase these tickets is of no consequence so long as they are able to sell their tickets. In the case of secondary reselling platforms, revenue is derived based on a percentage of the total ticket price. Basically, the higher the ticket price, the higher their commission.

The current ticket buying process looks a bit like this:

Under the current paradigm, fans like us are forced to pay sky-high prices for tickets to see our favorite artists, all the while primary and secondary ticket platforms derive record-breaking profits.

Artists and fans alike have, rightfully so, been extremely opposed to secondary resellers for years, but due to lack of any realistic alternative, are forced to accept the current paradigm.

Aventus is tackling these problems to ensure that fans are never taken advantage of through exorbitant secondary resale prices and counterfeit tickets again. The Aventus protocol is a blockchain-based event ticketing solution that completely eliminates counterfeit tickets and unregulated secondary ticket markets.

Under the Aventus protocol, the ticket buying process looks like this:

Aventus ensures that the only way tickets can be transferred is through its blockchain layer (which we do not receive any fees from). By associating a unique identifier to each ticket on the protocol, Aventus eliminates the possibility of creating counterfeit tickets. Aventus also allows event organisers to place minimum and more importantly maximum price caps on secondary tickets (meaning you’ll never have to pay 1000% price increases for tickets again!).

Under the current model, the only people making money off of secondary resale are the reseller and the platform they’re selling it through. With Aventus, the revenue will be split between the artist, the venue, and the reseller, meaning now the extra money spent on secondary tickets will finally go towards supporting your favorite artists’ events instead of ticket scalpers!

To put it in perspective, if Aventus had been in existence during Adele’s Finale Tour, secondary prices wouldn’t have been able to go higher than £200.00 for the highest tiered tickets!

Exciting? We think so too. To stay up-to-date with Aventus as it develops follow us on Twitter, join our Slack Channel, or check out our website.