Developing the First Blockchain Event Ticketing App

True Tickets sought to create an app that addressed the ticketing industry’s three biggest issues: fans losing tickets to bots and scalpers, counterfeit tickets, and loss of profit for artists and venues due to ticket resales on reseller platforms.

True Tickets disrupted the entertainment industry with the first-ever blockchain-based ticketing application for IOS and Android.

True Tickets recognized that the event ticketing industry suffered from three major issues: fans were losing tickets to bots and scalpers, tickets could be counterfeited, and artists and venues were not profiting from ticket resales on reseller platforms.

To counter these issues, True Tickets looked to build a minimum viable product (MVP) able to create a digital event ticket on the blockchain outside the control of ticket scalpers and ticket bots. This would allow event creators to facilitate sales to fans before bots, set an optional maximum resale price, and direct a share of resale ticket proceeds to the artist and venue, providing first-time entry of artists and venue to a legitimate resale marketplace.

To achieve this goal, True Tickets sought to leverage the capabilities of an immutable ledger and build their end-to-end ticketing platform using IBM Blockchain. To do so, they needed to find a blockchain technology partner to develop consumer-based iOS and Android mobile applications. True Tickets selected Chateaux due to both their expertise with enterprise mobile application development and blockchain production solutions and their IBM Blockchain Partner status.

Development team members from Chateaux’s Tetralys Blockchain Solutions division worked with the True Tickets team and their partners to determine requirements and build out the blockchain solution. The project ran on an agile basis, with two-week scrums delivering major blocks of new functionality.

Chateaux encountered and solved many issues to ensure the smart contract features of the blockchain tickets are operational. The development team built a solution that consists of iOS and Android mobile apps with which fans can buy, sell, and give tickets, and an event management web application with which event promoters and venues can sell and manage tickets. The team also created a scanner app to read the QR barcodes on the digital ticket for the gatekeeper at an event. The design includes the IBM Hyperledger blockchain, payment gateway integration, and an Azure cloud infrastructure.

Following the successful completion of the MVP stage, the Beta stage was undertaken with a series of live events to test the application. These events included comedy, music, and charity events during which users were able to provide product feedback in a live setting.

Chateaux successfully rolled out the application in production in both the Apple Store and Android Play Store, building the first commercially viable application for digital tickets that are smart contracts on the blockchain.

True Tickets now has a tool for users to host events and profit from ticket sales. Since the platform is built on a scalable architecture, it can ramp up the number of users, events, and event types, as needed.

Since its release, True Tickets has been used for several public events, including Willy Town Music Festival in Ohio and IBM Blockchain Summit in Los Angeles. Tickets can be bought, sold, and transferred today on the blockchain.

True Tickets is an event ticketing startup headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. They are poised to disrupt the event ticketing industry with a blockchain solution that prohibits ticket scalping and empowers both fans and artists with greater control over the ticket-purchasing life cycle.