OPEN

The way to become a winner in the crypto industry has more to do with the amount of attention you can draw to the project than actual usage. The OGs in the crypto industry know this. Since OPEN will see its ticket volume increase enormously in the coming period and the usage department is therefore doing well, we will have to focus on the attention war, and for this, we need your help. With this blog, I want to take you along and explain what has happened in the past, how we will continue, and why we will succeed in our mission.

The OPEN ecosystem aims to break the existing hegemony in the ticketing industry by becoming the transparent data standard in onchain ticketing and has been working hard on this for over seven years.

Due to the state of blockchain technology in 2016, we consciously chose to build and operate our own ticketing system, GUTS. This self-developed ticketing application serves as a showcase/example implementation for the added value of onchain ticketing and has been successful in this regard.

GUTS is successful because of the proximity to the inventory of tickets we’ve achieved by onboarding very successful independent artists in our local market.

Fully onchain ticketing was technically impossible until recently. Blockchain was still in its infancy, making speed, tooling, and usage costs impossible to fully decentralize access rights and use them onchain. GUTS has introduced many promises of Web3 to the public in a Web2 way. This so-called Web2.5 approach has been successful. It has validated the use case of onchain ticketing, provided valuable market insights, and demonstrated the potential of Web3.

Whitelabels

Due to the success of GUTS, an attempt was made during the pandemic to launch a Ticketing As A Service product in the global market. These whitelabels were intended to mitigate the risk of dependence on one market and scale up what we were doing in our domestic market in the Netherlands with strong independent artists.

Unfortunately, this strategy did not succeed. We had to reorganize in a big way. 80% of our efforts and capital were allocated to the whitelabel strategy and this was no longer sustainable. I made the decision to communicate the reorganisation after the fact for all sorts of reasons, but it explains why we were less engaged with the community.

Sure, we’ve made ample mistakes with the execution, but the main reason for the whitelabel strategy failing is because the ticketing game is rigged as fuck. The ticketing cartels’ main business model is opaqueness. Over 80% of the global market is inaccessible due to the ticketing cartel that vertically integrated about the entire value chain. Fighting over the remaining 20% of the market with an abundance of Web2 ticketing companies is a fool’s errand, and we decided not to play that game anymore. The existing whitelabels will transfer to the GUTS brand over time. This will be a gradual process because the events for which tickets have already been sold must have taken place.

Modular transparency and business models

Instead of competing over the leftovers, we’ve decided to give the long tail of Web2 ticketing companies a fighting chance against the ticketing cartel. OPEN will give all ticketing companies something that is unique with Web3: transparency. Modular and easy-to-implement Web3 functionalities like a transparent and honest onchain secondary market, event financing, and an awesome Web3 marketing infrastructure.

Creators are in many ways dependent on the current status quo. Money, technology, and vertical integration tie everyone in the value chain. OPEN will remove these dependencies one by one in a decentralized way, and every month we dedicate a blog to describing a problem in the current ticketing market, how it arose, and the (decentralized) solution that OPEN offers. We are going to beat the ticketing cartel at their own game with something they cannot copy: transparency.

The community and fans demand transparency and a normal functioning ticket market  from creators

OPEN provides frictionless transparency and new business models to existing ticketing companies.

If we succeed with these two elements, the opportunity is huge. The ticketing cartel is going to fail sooner or later. OPEN has acquired a unique position to truly bring transparency to the market. Many have failed (over 150 projects and no other party in the market comes close. Such an opportunity will come only once in a lifetime. OPEN is here as a working alternative for an >85 billion dollar business, ready to take over in a way that fits the current way of distributing access rights.

Onwards!

When creators, who have the ultimate monopoly, are able to operate independently of the ticketing cartel with our technology, then we have won. However, the current cartel is quite an obstacle, which will have to disappear. This will not happen without a movement: our crypto community explaining to ‘normal’ fans that we can tokenize the hatred against the ticketing cartel, get rich in the process, and make the ticketing cartel piss(ed) off. We need a movement of crypto and non-crypto people that will hold the industry accountable and demand transparency from their creators.

We will be there with proven tech that is easy to integrate.

The silence is broken, and we will not leave you in the dark anymore. Operating in the traditional ticketing game through the whitelabels made us adopt opaqueness. That is no longer the case, and we can truly be OPEN! The coming six months are going to be a ride of a lifetime. I sincerely hope you join us.