Get Protocol — Cryptoverse AMA recap
27th January 2020
Guest: Olivier Biggs- Marketeer
Kasper Keunen — Blockchain Developer
INTRODUCTION
Please briefly introduce yourselves and #GetProtocol to our community??
Olivier Biggs:- Hi guys! Thanks for having us. GET Protocol is a blockchain-based ticketing solution with a headquarters in Amsterdam. Currently our team consists of 25 people.
The protocol enables ticketing companies from all over the world to sell honest and transparent tickets. Over the past 3.5 years, we have sold over 350.000 tickets this way. We have spent this time making our product perfect, and we are now ready to take it abroad, starting in Korea soon.
We also have the GET token. For every ticket sold — our GET token is used as a type of fuel. Some of this GET is then also burned forever.
Here’s our explainer video, for those who are curious. :)
Kasper Keunen :- Hi Cryptoversians Thanks again for having us. I am Kasper, working as blockchain developer for the GET Protocol since 2017 GET has a fully operational product used by main stream users for about 3 years now. Since the start we have sold/resold more than 350k+ tickets and we are expected to do a lot more now we are also active in other countries (Korea is first).
We do not sell regular tickets, but dynamic user bound tickets :). That is the big difference with regular tickets, ours are personal. They cannot be resold outside of our platform.
ASK ME ANYTHING
Q: Does the GET protocol make it difficult to buy tickets for participants? Why do they have to take many steps to own a ticket when the tradition is so simple?
A: Good question. Buying a ticket is not necessarily that much harder than with normal tickets. We already have sold hundreds of thousands of tickets to regular people in the Netherlands, without any issues.
The only difference with regular tickets is that with a smart ticket the digital asset is locked to your phone number instead of to an email address. By doing this we know who owns the ticket.
You can buy a test ticket for yourself here by the way:
you’ll see it is very easy :).
Q: What’s the role of Blockchain in the GetProtocol ecosystem? Please shed light on all the factors which make it apart from the current ticket mechanism? Why should Get protocol to be adopted/welcomed/included?
A: Sure — our tickets are registered on the blockchain for transparency and accountability purposes. This is a huge problem in the traditional ticketing industry, with companies such as TicketMaster and Viagogo taking a lot of money from consumers because there is no real transparency about the amount of tickets or their original price.
Our tickets are registered on the blockchain so that consumers can verify the validity of the ticket.
On our homepage you can find the previous hashes for these registrations:
And an explanation on how to read these hashes:
Q: From technological and commercial perspectives, how can traditional companies be integrated into the blockchain?
What are your plans for traditional companies that continue to exist with their own systems?
A: It is a beneficial move for existing companies in many ways. For one, our digital tickets provide them with all the relevant data for ticket holders. That way they know exactly who owns their tickets and who has done so in the past. That is not the case with current ticketing companies.
Also, our digital tickets effectively prevent scalping and fraud, which is a huge problem and causes a lot of frustration and reputation damage.
We also have a video of our business developer, explaining more benefits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCtZnP85eNU&t
Q: What are the benefits of Digital Smart Tickets that Traditional Ticketing system? Also, Is there any drawbacks in Digital ticketing? If so, then How Get protocol is solving them?
A: The big benefit is that smart tickets cannot be resold outside of the system. So this makes it impossible for ticket scalpers (people that buy tickets and resell them for x2-x20 the original price) impossible. The tickets are locked to and identity, so we know exactly who is inside and event and how they are behaving. This video shows a demo of how this looks in a festival setting:
There are drawbacks in that digital ticketing needs internet access to work. But luckily there are means to buffer / pre-load certain data to ensure the app still works when the internet is out (temporarily).
Here is a good article that shows how we completely stopped scalping for Holland’s #1 comedian. He sold over 100K tickets with us and used to have a lot of problems with this.
Q: Getprotocal $GET seems to be listed in small exchanges Can we expect in Big exchanges like Binance, Huobi etc in 2020 and tell me the new upcoming events of $GET?
A: Yes — we have a big listing lined up for Q2 of this year, perhaps even earlier.
We have new events and artists using the protocol pretty much every week. Some recent news was a big festival joining:
We are also doing several big stadium sales this year — which has been called the ‘biggest blockchain show’
Q: Can you explain how the GET PROTOCOL tokenomics works?
A: Yes! For every ticket issued, the GET token is needed as a type of fuel. (Comparable to gas for ETH.) This GET is provided by the protocol to ticketing companies and bought back at a later point from the open market (traders.)
This creates organic volume and demand for the token. On top of this, GET used as fuel is also burned afterwards, effectively reducing the circulating supply.
If you want to know more, check out
https://get-protocol.io/token/
Q: What’s the $GET Advantage of Partnership with $Klaytin? Klaytin Blockchain Platform?
A: Good question. We are using Klaytn as it gives us access to the Kakao ecosystem. Kakao is the ‘whatsapp’ of Korea and has 300 million active users there. As we will be entering this market in a large way this year, we wanted to position ourselves in that market and onboard a important partner in Kakao/Klaytn. We explained more about this choice in this blog by the way, in case you are interested in more details:
Q: What is Get Protocol trying to solve? What are the main problems and disadvantages of traditional ticket services? what are Get Protocol’s solutions to these?
A: We are solving ticket scalping. This is a problem in India as well as we know from a few partners we have spoken there. It is the practice of people buying all tickets and reselling them for a very high price. This rips fans and artists off. By making the ticket truely digital we can ensure that all tickets are sold for the same price and by using blockchain, we provide transparency in both the primary and secondary market.
Q: What’s real-world use of Getprotocol ? Where can we expect the use of Getprotocol services? For which types of problems relief is expected from Getprotocol ecosystem?
A: So I feel we are a pretty unique crypto project, in the sense that we already have a fairly significant amount of adoption. Already 2 ticketing companies are using our system, and a third one will hopefully be added soon.
We are selling thousands of tickets per week, which all create an organic demand for our token.
So far we have kept our heads down and made sure we have a product that is usable worldwide, and now we are at the point where we can start making noise. We are now very actively pursuing opportunities in Korea, and will most likely have significant adoption there in the short term.
I will not give you investment advice, but I do believe we are one of the very few projects that have a provable track record of adoption and a highly likely position for growth. (But that’s just my opinion.
Q: Which country do you choose besides NETHERLANDS?
How many tickets will be sold this year and from how many ticket companies + countries?
A: In 2017 & 2018 we have mainly sold tickets in the Netherlands while finishing and perfecting our product based on real market feedback and improvement. In 2019 we focussed on scaling the platform to international markets. We have been onboarding local partners in target countries since.
Most interesting and prominent leads are in Korea, Italy and the UK.
Q: What is the role of the $GET token in the ecosystem, why use it, and why should we hold it?
A:For every state change that is processed we buy back GET from the open market. This GET is then burned, reducing the total supply. You can track our buybacks here:
Q: Is it possible to use tickets from GET protocol in places that don’t have access to the internet?How can a person that doesn’t have a smartphone get a ticket? How’s the validation process? What makes it different than other validators?
A: Very good question. We actually are now working on a solution for offline scanning. The short answer is; yes it is possible. We use a combination of buffering and p2p syncing to make sure that no invalid tickets are accepted.
If you do not have a smartphone you cannot own a smarkt ticket. Luckely the portion of the population without a smartphone is getting smaller and smaller worldwide. But good point regardless!
Scanning / validating tickets is similar to regular tickets. Only difference is that our QR codes change on the ticket-owners phone.
This is a video of a business event we ticketed a year back, it shows a bit what smart ticketing can do and how it is better as regular ‘dumb’ ticketing. Check it out:
Q: What killer features Get porotocol has that are ahead of the competition and how does intend to open up the technology to the community and to researchers so it can be continuously improved on?
A: So our tickets are 100% digital, and registered to a user’s smartphone. This innovation alone brings with it a crazy amount of advantages, as opposed to the traditional ticketing companies that just send you a PDF.
A few examples of these benefits are the possibility to monitor exactly which ticket holders are already checked in at an event (for example a festival) and also monitor who is not there yet.
Another one is that you can communicate directly to your ticket holders. Event organizers love this, because they can send out relevant information or little inside jokes. This is also a MAJOR improvement in terms of crowd safety. (Imagine there’s a fire at a football stadium and you need to communicate the right place to exit the venue to specific people based on location of their seats.
Q: What are the main characteristics feature of Get protocol token?
WHAT are the real life use case of Get protocol token?
A: The GET token is used fuel tickets. How this exactly works is a long story, but if you want to play around with the effects of this burning and the buybacks I encourage you to play around with out modelling tool on our website:
Q: One purpose of this project is to that people who buy tickets to sell for a higher price get counteracted yes? How does GET protocol do that exactly?
A: With traditional tickets you are able to make a screenshort or download a PDF file with the QR code (or barcode). With smart tickets this is not possible as the QR changes every few seconds. The ticket is locked to your identity(phone) so a seller has to sell the ticket anonymous through our platform, where we control the price rules.
Q: Are there established companies showing interest in GET Protocol project? If so, which ones and in which sectors?
A: Yes, very much so. The first user of the protocol has been lucky enough to generate a lot of media attention, both nationally and internationally.
Here’s a clip about that company on CBS New York for example:
Thanks to this media attention about that fact that we have effectively eliminated scalping for a lot of artists and event organizers, we have received A LOT of requests from big international companies and artists.
To give you an idea — we have been approached by companies and organizers from all of the green countries on this map:
As mentioned, we are currently working on integration in South Korea, but at the same time we are streamlining this process so that any company from any country can very quickly start using the protocol.
Q: In challenging crypto market condition any project is really difficult to survive and we are witnessing that there are many platforms . What is $GET project plan for surviving in this long blockchain marathon? In this plan, what motivates long term investors and believers?
A: Over the last 2/3 years (after the ICO) we have focussed on building the product. This means that as of today we have a set of paying customers, due to this there is revenue being generated.
Because of this focus on actual adoption, we have ensured we will stay around regardless of the crypto market sentiment. If you want to read more about this approach in this blog:
Q: Guess I’m a event organizer and I do numbers of events. How $GET_PROTOCOL makes the ticketing solution more easy for me? How it handles the supply & demand both sustainable?
A: Event organizers mainly benefit because they have the full data of everybody going to their event. Otherwise, a lot of attendee data is lost because of the secondary market.
If an event organizer wants they could even configure rules where they will receive a portion of the profits generated by resellers on the secondary market. This way an event organizer will benefit financially.
In addition, using a smart ticket system is beneficial for the artists as less fans get scammed/ripped off with fake or way to expensive tickets of scalpers.
In this video we explain more about this concept:
Q:What is your long-term vision about the industry which GetProtocol is working at? Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology can replace GetProtocol?
A: Good question. One thing about the ticketing industry is that it is absolutely enormous. There are a crazy amount of ticketing companies and the world, as there are even crazier amounts of tickets being sold for millions of events.
We can already see that we are greatly influencing other ticketing companies, as they are trying to adapt their systems to be more like what we have designed. Although we are flattered, we should keep innovating to stay ahead of the game.
We are constantly creating new features and user experiences that allign with our goals of world domination. Our big advantage is that our team of 28 people is very flexible and determined, and we have laid a very solid groundwork in terms of technology.
For the other traditional ticketing companies, changing their system requires crazy amounts of investments in both time and money — which is a problem we don’t have.
So, we expect to greatly increase the amount of users as we continue to prove what we can do in international markets.
The GET Protocol will become the one and only standard for all rights of entry worldwide. As of now we are focussing on events, but it is not unthinkable other sectors as transportation might become in scope as time moves on. For now we will continue disrupting the event industry as it has been at a standstill for decades. For more context on where we are going I recommend checking out this video on the subject:
Q: In my opinion, GETProtocol is a great project but still “under-radar” in crypto community. Does GETProtocol have any marketing/community program to raise more awareness about your project?
A: Very true! Although we have been around for a little while (at least in terms of crypto), we have not yet been discovered by most traders.
We made a conscious decision to build our product and client base before spending crazy amounts on marketing and hype, without having anything to show for it.
Now we are at the point where we have achieved a significant amount of adoption and are getting ready to reach some big milestones. That’s why we want to start making noise and make traders who value real projects with big potential aware of what we are doing and what is about to happen.
Q: What’s your outlook on the future of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain?
What is the Role of Tokens in your Getprotocol Ecosystem & why do you need Blockchain, if Yes you need Blockchain then why you need GET tokens?
A: We are all about real life adoption. You can even say that we are a bit skeptical in terms of most crypto projects, as there is so much fluff and so little actual real-world thinking taking place.
We have always been in touch with real-world clients and users, and believe that the way we use blockchain (without users having to know about it) is the fastest way to significant adoption.
Hundreds of thousands of people have already used blockchain and our token thanks to our system, and they don’t even know about it.
Q: Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to Get protocol and how? What are the actions to increase awareness around Get protocol in non-crypto space?
What are the Advantages of Get Protocol project over other projects?
A: So the main benefit is that where a lot of crypto projects have a service or application that is projected to be used by the mainstream in the future, GET is used today.
Because we are already making it happen we are quite often covered by international media, for example by CBS:
Q: What are the major milestones you have achieved so far?
A: Just off the top of my head:
- Selling out a comedy tour of 100K+ tickets
- Selling several stadium pop shows
- Getting organic global coverage on places like CBS New York
- Ticketing festivals
- Some exciting news in Korea which is coming up shortly..
More about the GET Protocol
A blockchain-based honest ticketing solution for all.
Any questions or want to know more about what we do? Join our active Telegram community for any questions you might have, read our whitepaper, visit the website, join the discussion on the GET Protocol Reddit. Or get yourself a smart event ticket in our sandbox environment. Download the GUTS Tickets app on iOS or Android.
Join Cryptoverse Community below:
Youtube: Cryptoverse
Twitter: Cryptoverse
Telegram: Cryptoverse
