For the last two years, ownership change of tickets sold on the GET Protocol has been processed via a Solidity smart contract. Initially, the Ethereums testnet was used, since Q3 last year, ownership registration moved to mainnet. More than 65 000 tickets have been registered by our GET’s runnersince the move. This upcoming Saturday 50 000+ additional ownership registrations will be appended to Ethereums ledger by the GET Protocol.

While we expect the ticket sale of Saturday to sell out in less than 2 hours, the registration of ownership on the blockchain is expected to take up to 6 days. That is clearly not ideal or even useful. In the following sections I will cover what we learned from past experiences and how we are going about solving it!

Our journey of on-chain experimentation of ticket ownership registration resulted in more than 70 000 unique consumers unknowingly using their firstcrypto wallet. That alone is a huge win for us and crypto in general. A lot of valuable lessons were learned along the way. Some lessons came at awkward moments (like during one of our first big sales), other problems we expected to encounter at some point. Drawing from these hard-earned lessons we have several harsh conclusions about Ethereum for this particular use case. Before we get into it, it should be noted that we still believe strongly in ETH.

Why Ethereum isn’t a fit for ticket ownership registration right now

While the Solidity smart contract registration worked in providing transparency, there are several fundamental problems.

Transaction throughput on Ethereum is slow and unpredictable.

Conducting logic on Ethereum is expensive.

Solidity smart contracts have unnecessary large attack surfaces.

To keep this blog concise we will leave the old behind and crack open a jar of category theory (it’s little Friday after all). But before we get into the wonderful world of Petri nets and hashes, let me make sure everybody is briefed on what exactly we want to accomplish with ownership registration on the blockchain in the first place.

Why blockchain?

As is laid out in the GET Protocol white paper, there are several areas in ticketing where lack of transparency and trust is causing inefficiencies and fan/artist outrage. Ownership registration is one of these areas. It is our belief that by registering certain data about a ticket, like if a ticket is valid or not, its price and an events ticket resell rules on a blockchain. From a shared source of truth, more efficient market coordination will emerge to prevent rent-seeking parasitic scalpers profiting of fans.