In this blog post, we will explain why the Aventus token — AventCoin (AVT) — is essential to the mission and operation of the Aventus protocol, and explain how exactly it is used.

“The fuel of the Aventus ecosystem.”

It is essential to align the economic incentives of network participants such that the problems of touting, counterfeits and fraud are solved.

The Aventus protocol aims to create a global pool of legitimate events from which any verified participant can sell tickets and thereby earn commissions, effectively allowing anyone to become a promoter. This is very advantageous for event organisers because it allows them reach a wider target audience. Since the Aventus protocol solves the issues of counterfeit tickets and unregulated touting, any approved promoter or ticketing app building atop the protocol can leverage these solutions to provide maximum security to their clients, and ensure the event organisers’ rules are enforced.

Overall, AVT is used in two scenarios:

Stake-weighted voting to verify events and applications on the protocol, as a means of de-siloing of the event ticketing industry.

Stake-weighted matching of buyers and sellers in the secondary market, as part of preventing unregulated touting.

The De-Siloing of the Event Ticketing Industry

By solving the issues of counterfeit tickets and unregulated touting in the event ticketing industry, the Aventus protocol is able to have an even bigger vision: to completely de-silo the event ticketing industry, disintermediating the processes of:

creating and managing events and their associated tickets and

and and their associated tickets and promoting events and selling tickets

Most ticketing applications differentiate themselves in 3 key ways: (1) through the fees they take; (2) through the events they manage to obtain and sell tickets for; and (3) through their returning user bases of ticket buyers who browse their platforms for shows, that they can propose as a selling point to event organisers for choosing their ticketing platform over others. The applications therefore tend to both manage the processes of (a) creating events and tickets, and (b) promoting and selling tickets.

At Aventus, we wish to creating a global, open pool of legitimate events that verified event and ticketing applications can contribute to and monitor, and that other (or the same) verified ticketing and promoter applications can sell tickets for and gain commissions for doing so. We imagine these ticketing and promoter applications to be anything from a standard application like TicketsNow, to a front end built for promoting events to a niche community (e.g. Star Wars fans), to front ends built by social influencers. This is very beneficial for event organisers, as it allows them to reach a wider audience.

To fulfil this vision, we need to achieve 2 things:

Consensus around the legitimacy of events, so that ticketing applications and promoters do not lose money from making ticket sales for fake events;

Consensus around an approved list of ticketing applications and promoters using the protocol to sell tickets, since we do not want fans to receive counterfeit tickets from fraudulent applications claiming to use the Aventus protocol when they either do not (similar to people sending around fake token sale contract addresses).

The Ethereum blockchain’s properties are a perfect fit for this — coming to a decentralised consensus on these lists, so that the participants need not trust Aventus to fairly curate them, is a necessity. AVT is used to enable stake-weighted voting for the curation of these lists.

Prevention of Unregulated Touting in the Secondary Market

Aventus achieves the vision of de-siloing the event ticketing industry by preventing unregulated touting. If Adele wants to prevent scalping at her concert in the UK next month, she can, whilst still allowing multiple platforms (using the protocol) to sell her tickets.

One of the factors allowing Aventus to give event organisers control over secondary markets is by creating anonymity between buyers and sellers; e.g., ticket resellers do not know who they are selling their tickets to. A blog post in the future will go into detail about how we do this, but as an overview we allow buyers to bid on a ticket for a certain time period, and then randomly determine the winner.

Since blockchains are deterministic, to obtain randomness for this sampling we allow “matchers” to submit random numbers throughout the bidding period, and at the end of the interval we select the winning matcher based on a stake-weighted probability distribution.

AVT’s use cases

For a typical event the following happens:

Event is added to the Aventus protocol and an event creation fee (in AVT) is paid to the network to host the event. This fee is held in the event smart contract until the event finishes. The purpose of this fee is to prevent spamming the network with a large amount of invalid events and thus will fluctuated based on the number of invalid event over any period of time. Event is validated by the network. If reported, a deposit must be placed by the reporter (in AVT). If the event host matches the deposit, an AVT stake-weighted vote is initiated. If not the event is closed and deemed illegitimate. Both deposits remain in the event smart contract until the end of the event. The deposit is returned to either the event host or reporter based on the outcome of the vote and the other deposit is divided amongst the voters. Event starts primary market ticket sales. Event goer buys ticket in fiat (immediately exchanged to ETH/AVT) or in ETH/AVT directly, which is then sent to the event organiser and any other parties receiving a fee (e.g. promoter, ticketing app, event hosting platform) at which point it is exchanged back into fiat to avoid any currency volatility risk. Event starts secondary ticket sales. Sellers will put tickets up at a specific price. Upon doing this, they must also pay the resale fee (in AVT), which is only charged if their ticket is matched with a purchaser. For a certain time period, buyers register a firm intent to purchase the ticket. After the time period, “matchers” compete for the right to allocate tickets to buyers — the chance any matcher allocates a ticket to a buyer is determined by a probability distribution weighted by their AVT stake. Every successful match receives the resale fee and some AVT from the new user incentive pot.

Other uses for AVT in the network but outside of events:

Voting on system parameters : The system needs to be able to change and adapt over time. Various parameters that determine how the system functions are set in a decentralised and autonomous manner. It costs a deposit of AVT to put forward a new proposal for system parameters. If multiple proposals are put forward a vote is initiated, if not the only proposal put forward wins. The winning proposal’s owner receives the deposit back and the deposit(s) from all other proposals are distributed amongst voters. Every three months system parameters are adjusted, after which all AVT from proposals is distributed amongst voters.

: The system needs to be able to change and adapt over time. Various parameters that determine how the system functions are set in a decentralised and autonomous manner. It costs a deposit of AVT to put forward a new proposal for system parameters. If multiple proposals are put forward a vote is initiated, if not the only proposal put forward wins. The winning proposal’s owner receives the deposit back and the deposit(s) from all other proposals are distributed amongst voters. Every three months system parameters are adjusted, after which all AVT from proposals is distributed amongst voters. Voting on legitimate applications sitting on the protocol: An application (e.g. ticketing app or promoter) submits a deposit (in AVT) and applies with their domain name. During the challenge period, anyone can match the deposit to claim that the application is fraudulent and an AVT stake-weighted vote is initiated. The deposit of the losing claim’s party is distributed amongst voters and the winning one’s is returned. Every 2 months, each application’s legitimacy can undergo another challenge period.

Note: ticket purchases need not happen in AVT. We also allow ticket buyers to purchase in Ether, thereby making the barriers to using the decentralised system and even integrating with payment processors lower.