My thoughts this month were abnormally preoccupied by the fact that the event ticketing problem (especially for large acts) in this country is far from solved. In fact, I feel like it's just become far worse. Ticketmaster of course is the dominant force in this industry, but that wasn't always the case. The current state
of this industry arose out of rapid venue consolidation throughout the 1990s into the hands of a few major players. Eventually, many of these players were ultimately purchased by and/or became LiveNation. Things only got worse when LiveNation ultimately took control of Ticketmaster, essentially creating a monopoly that controls pretty much all venues capable of housing a certain size crowd and the distribution mechanism for the tickets.
Many people have historically blamed scalpers for all of these issues, but they're really just exploiting the failures of the ticketing companies and capitalizing on demand. Tickemaster eventually realized this and created their own form of 'scalping' fans by instituting "platinum" tickets right from on sale day. This has just exacerbated problems because people don't seem to realize that these prices are inflated
from what the artist would like to charge and expect to recoup this value (and then some) in the secondary market.
Several companies, venues and artists have tried to challenge this conglomerate, but they all end up losing or being bought out in the end. For the last several years, I've used Cash or Trade (CoT) to get most of my tickets. This was mainly because they were
the 'face' of the face value movement. They diligently removed any tickets that were being sold for above face value. As of this summer though, CoT is no longer an effective solution. It's grown to the point that so many people use it, that demand far exceeds supply. Many of the new users, purchase on CoT and then resell on the ticket hubs that allow sale above face value. Recently, they updated the app to require a message be sent with a ticket buy offer. I
have evidence that this is being exploited to offer additional payment 'off platform' to ensure that their offer is accepted.
So what does this have to do with this newsletter? If you ignore the fact that LiveNation/Ticketmaster is a complete monopoly for artists that require venues beyond a certain size (and also limit the geographic area that they can play in a way that
prevents them from using venues that aren't), one of the biggest issues is that all of the upstart ticketing platforms are vulnerable to Sybil attacks. Even if you solved this, the contracts between artists and venues (sharing ticket profits equitably) and artists and their
fans (guaranteeing face value tickets get into the hands of people who are going to attend the show) aren't enforceable once they're off an honorable ticketing platform and in the hands of wetware.
I mentioned in the past about my effort to get into Kernel. The project (that I ultimately shelved) that I was using to get accepted to Kernel was an onchain, ticketing solution. I had a basic prototype that used smart contracts to enforce the venue/artist agreements and a plan for building out the next layer to support the 'contracts' between artist and fans. This was all built on the Ethereum L1, so transaction fees were a real concern. My Kernel project was going to be to port the entire thing to an Ethereum L2 to
create sub $.01 transaction fees and spend whatever time I had left working on the other loose ends.
Sybil resistance was still a real problem and the whole user experience of getting users that didn't understand/hated 'crypto' onboarded to use the app was something that seemed extremely daunting to workaround. I feel like both of these issues are much easier to solve now.
Using Farcaster for the 'identity' layer of this app lays the groundwork for both. Coupling Farcaster ID with Human Passport starts to build the foundation for fairly solid Sybil resistance. Since each Farcaster account, now has an integrated, pass thru crypto wallet, you can build an abstraction layer for this, that accepts credit card payment and then behind the scenes converts that to USDC, executes the necessary onchain transactions that ultimately 'mints' the NFT that represents your event ticket and safely stores it in your 'wallet'.
The biggest remaining problem is getting venues and artists interested in using this. Obviously, it will need to start at the smallest levels where at least right now, the benefits of this system will not be immediately apparent. I have ideas of how to make this more enticing. Thoughts? What would prevent you, as any of the potential stakeholders, from using this? If I've peaked anyone's interest, reach
out, let's discuss!
