What is the Aventus Protocol

The ticketing industry has been plagued by four problems for the longest time: touting, counterfeits, oversight and promotion. Touting refers to automated computer programs called bots bulk buying tickets in primary releases (like TicketMaster) and reselling them for inflated prices on secondary markets (like StubHub). Fans and artists have been fighting this problem for years. These same bots often list tickets bought on multiple secondary sites, the first person to buy gets the real ticket and all others receive counterfeits and cannot gain admittance to the event. There are also a range of fraudulent sites that sell exclusively fraudulent tickets to fraudulent events. This may not seem like much of a problem until you are made aware of the degree of customer confusion. Aventus’ advisor Professor Mike Waterson states in his government report that 1 in 4 customers do not even know if they are buying a ticket from a primary or secondary market. According to former TicketMaster CEO, Sean Moriarty, 35% of ticket inventory goes unsold and when customers are asked why they did not attend the most popular answer is that they did not know about the event.

Attempts have been made to counter these problems but so far none have been successful. Technological solutions include using machine learning and various data analytical techniques to identify if the user posting a ticket for sale is actually a human and not an automated computer bot. This has performed rather poorly since machine learning can just as easily be used by bots to learn how to behave like a user on a website. Other options include not allowing resale of tickets or only allowing it at face value. This seems to fix the problem but as soon as you look a little deeper you can find black markets forming. Legislation has also been useless here, in the UK resale of football tickets is only allowed by authorised resellers but you can always find a ticket around the corner from the stadium for sale, in the US it was made illegal and they later the government gave up on it stating oversight was impossible and even Australia who allows resale at max 10% above face value sees black markets appearing.

What is Aventus

Aventus’ Ethereum-based economic model that eliminates uncontrolled resale and counterfeit tickets. It allows event organizers to create, manage and promote their events and tickets with dramatically reduced costs, even letting them set price controls and receive commissions on ticket resales. It also gives ticket buyers rewards for promoting events, and identifying fraudulent activity.

Aventus’ innovations vastly improve upon existing solutions by bringing oversight and transparency to the ticketing lifecycle, security to the transfer and validity of tickets, new revenue streams for event organizers and greater promotional capabilities. Aventus is creating a global open standard for the exchange of tickets.

How does it work?

The Aventus team will work with third-party developers to create and launch the first ticket sales application in the sports and music industries that provide tools for the creation and managements of events and their respective tickets. These applications will also allow for the creation of promotional campaigns that can help drive ticket sales up. Attendees will also be able to purchase tickets, receive rewards and find new events easily.

In the Aventus’ system, each ticket has a unique identifier on the Ethereum blockchain, making counterfeits impossible.

This unique identifier is connected to the owner’s identity, which must be added when purchasing the ticket from the primary market. The identity of the ticket holders will then be confirmed against the identity recorded on the blockchain before entry is granted. All data on the blockchain is secure since all information is hashed or encrypted to ensure complete privacy.

This solution alone would normally mean that tickets cannot be resold or that if they can, out of band transactions can still be used to pay part of the price and create black markets. However, Aventus applies a clever solution that ensures that the user can resell his ticket if he wants but within the range price and to an unknown buyer.

This system provides secondary market control, ensuring that tickets cannot be sold outside of the Aventus Protocol and that resale prices remain within the accepted target to maximize attendance.

Aventus will also provide other tools at the service layer like an easy-to-use Ethereum account management platform and a fiat to crypto conversion mechanisms so that users can buy tickets easily and that event organizers can quickly withdraw funds if they wish to convert them. “This will be done through a third party payment processor such as Uphold or MetalPay.”

As an additional failsafe mechanism, the Aventus Protocol incentivises network participants to report fictitious or fraudulent event using a decentralized consensus mechanism on the blockchain.

Aventus token

Like most smart contract system, the Aventus protocol has its own underlying token, AventCoin (AVT). The purpose of AVT is to fuel the Aventus ecosystem and ensure that the protocol runs autonomously, de-centrally, and without any fraud.

AVT is used for stake weighted voting and consensus mechanisms for voting on the legitimacy of:

• Events on the protocol (e.g. the global pool of verified events) => fraudulent events mean applications selling their tickets will lose customers, so we need to prevent this.
• Applications (either promoters or ticketing apps) sitting on top of the protocol => a list of verified applications needs to be determined so applications falsely claiming to use the protocol cannot sell fraudulent tickets.
• The parameters that determine how the protocol works, e.g. event creation fees or reporting fees.

It is also used to facilitate anonymous matching of buyers and ticket sellers in the secondary market. “Matchers” are like miners in the Ethereum/Bitcoin blockchains and get rewarded with new AVT for performing these computations. The winning “matcher” for a given ticket (like the winning miner of a given block) is chosen by an AVT stake-weighted probability distribution.

To learn more about the Aventus Protocol, visit the official website and read the whitepaper. Join the discussion on slack and read deeper on all topic covered here on the blog.

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