Summary of the GET Protocol

Note: This article was first published on our Medium page on November 21, 2017 and therefore may contain dated information.

The GET Protocol is a blockchain-based protocol that is used by ticketing companies to completely merge the primary and secondary ticketing market. The protocol gives complete control over the sale and trade between ticket holder from the moment the first ticket is sold until the last ticket is scanned. The platform’s own ERC20 token, the GET, functions as a FIAT value locking asset in a user’s wallet/smart ticket. The FIAT value of GET is set at the start of an event cycle. By this value locking mechanism all actors are shielded from crypto volatility during an event cycle. GUTS Tickets is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and has a working smart ticketing application that is already used by big event organizers in the Netherlands. This experience and operational readiness of its team makes the company perfectly positioned to develop the GET-protocol as the company is able to build the protocol and improve and deploy it incrementally.

Read our benchmark with Aventus and Blocktix here.

GUTS Tickets, The GET Foundation & the future of ticketing

The ticketing company GUTS is currently selling blockchain-registered tickets via its smart ticketing application. In 2017 alone the company sold tickets for more than 30 events totaling more than 10.000 tickets. Where traditional ticketing companies provide a buyer with a static QR code, the GUTS application serves the user with a dynamic QR code that changes as a function over time and owner. One of the Netherlands most prominent theater companies, Hekwerk Theaterproducties, have partnered with GUTS and its team. This deal alone secures protocol usage for more than 310.000 tickets in 2019.

Industry endorsement

Several prominent artists and their management, one of which is the manager of Martin Garrix, have shown their support for the GET Protocol vision of a efficient and transparent primary and secondary ticketing market, cutting out the profits made by parties adding little to no value in the value chain. The protocol allows ticket owners to resell their ticket anonymously to other consumers directly in the web-app without the risk of being defrauded or getting scalping with fees/excessive margins.

We are live.

The GET Protocol is more than a white paper or a proof of concept. It is reality. GUTS Tickets is already selling smart tickets registered on the blockchain. After the crowdsale is completed other functionalities as reselling tickets within a price margin will be added to the protocols functionality. Check out the events we ticket for or try out the sandbox environment and experience the future of ticketing for yourself.

Summary of the crowdsale of the GET-protocol.

The actors within GET Protocol

The Guaranteed Entrance Token (GET): transparent and open smart ticketing protocol for any event with regulated admission. The GET-Protocol provides primary actors in the event space the following benefits:

Users: GET ensures that event participants enjoy a secure and stress-free ticketing experience, and provides a simple and inexpensive way for ticket holders who cannot attend the event to securely sell their tickets to other users.
Content-creators: The GET Protocol prohibits commercial ticket resellers from disturbing the value chain; artists can be certain that their fans pay a fair price for a guaranteed, authentic ticket (as the dynamic QR can’t be sold outside of the protocol).
Event organizers: GET provides a scalable ticketing protocol to manage ticket sales for any size events in a secure and controlled manner. GET controls the true cost of transactions and the blockchain ensures both the true price and properties of tickets, thus eliminating middlemen from the value chain. The protocol increases market efficiency as a whole while increasing margins for the stakeholders delivering actual value.
Venues: GET provides users with an honest and fraud-free experience that promotes a higher occupancy rate of the venue. Venues also enjoy the benefits of clean customer data as there are not reseller platforms that corrupt accurate of the attendees attending.

About the token

Table summarizing all the details of the protocols own ERC20 token.

The guaranteed exchange rate and the stability fund

The stability fund will act as a siphon filled with GET and ETH and has the objective to always restore its original GET balance to 14% of the total GET issued. The role the SF will play in the GET-Protocol is as follows:

At initiation of the GET Protocol the stability fund will hold 14% of all available GET. These GET will be used to supply EOs with the GET they need to initiate an event ticketing contract, and account for all value in the smart ticket of the consumer.
The EO buys GET from the SF to cover for the smart ticket value of a specific event cycle. The minimal price of a smart ticket is set at least €0.50 in GET, so the SF will always have the event organizer pay at least €0.50 per 1 GET.
The SF has the objective to always restore its original GET balance to 14% of the total GET issued. Therefore, right after the EO purchased the GET it needed from the SF, the SF will ”buy” (exchange) back the GET it has sold to the EO
from the open market.
The SF has no other incentive than provide EOs with instant access to enough GET to use the GET Protocol for smart ticketing as well as provide token holders in the open market with a ”price” (exchange rate) bottom and to generate demand for GET from the GET-Protocol which creates market liquidity (the ”Guaranteed Exchange Rate” as further described below).
If the SF encounters trading losses and therefore isn’t able to regain 14% of the total supply of GET it will receive GET from the UGF until it is replenished.
If the SF encounters trading profits (and thus will hold more GET as 14%) the superfluous GET will be transferred to the UGF.
The SF will not be a completely automated/pre-determined fund from the beginning of the GET Protocol. The GET-Protocol team will closely monitor the stabilizing and pricing abilities of the fund and optimize its procedures and programming to ensure that the fund does what it is supposed to do: provide price stability and thus usability for GET-Protocol actors.

GET price on the open market

The oracle will ensure that the internal pricing of the GET will roughly follow the valuation of the GET price on the open markets/exchanges. In these markets the GET price is completely unrestricted in it’s valuation and how it is transferred from owner to owner. The GPO and the SF only act as gatekeepers that ensure actors within the protocol with relative price stability as well as offer token holders on the open market a guaranteed exchange rate of at least €0.50 per GET.

High level diagram showing how the price attributed per GET is set on a per-event basis by the stability fund. Providing both open market token holders with security and liquidity as well as ensuring usability of the protocol by event organizers and artists.

Go to market strategy

While bypassing all current ticketing stakeholders to create a new and completely disruptive platform seems tempting, GUTS Tickets has learned over the last 16 months that this strategy would ultimately fail. The thresholds required to penetrate the market are too great, and adoption of the GET Protocol would be severely limited. To maximize the chances for adoption, the GET-Foundation, supported by launching customer GUTS Tickets, will collaborate with current market stakeholders and will use existing infrastructure in the value chain. GUTS Tickets has partnered, and the GET Foundation will partner, with several powerhouses in the business to build desired features and functions, and these industry experts are helping us avoid mistakes and misconceptions about the market.

About the founding team

6% of the tokens issued during the crowdsale will be distributed under current team members. The other 7% will be kept for future team members!

This post is our two-page summary of the GET Protocol converted into a blog format. The original two-pager can be found on our website.

More about the GET Protocol ICO

If you want know more about the GET Initial Coin Offering, read our white paper, visit the ICO website, Telegram or get yourself a smart event ticket in our sandbox environment.