Desired Outcome 1:
To provide a Cardano blockchain based ticket selling marketplace for live and virtual events powered by smart contracts
Blocking problem
Legacy ticket sellers are middlemen that place high fees on the actual good, with little prevention of scalping or fraud
Costs of the problem
Entertainment is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors in the world ($2.6 trillion by 2025).
Ticket scalpers market estimated to be $15.9B in 2020.
The largest ticket seller in the US made over 10B in revenue in 2019.
Evidence
<https://www.consumersinternational.org/news-resources/blog/posts/consumers-sold-out-the-trouble-with-ticket-resale/,>
<https://www.choice.com.au/soldout,>
<https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/ticketmaster-pays-10-million-criminal-fine-intrusions-competitor-s-computer-systems-0,> <https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/online-shopping/drip-pricing,>
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/arts/music/ticket-scalping-bots.html,>
<https://www.ticketnews.com/2021/04/illegal-venue-rebates-new-york-ticketing-hearing/,>
<https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/scalping,>
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/193700/revenue-of-live-nation-entertainment-since-2006/>
Market: there is not yet a successfully implemented ticket sales platform on Cardano. Cardano is better suited than other blockchains to provide a backbone for a ticket service with the described functionality due to its speed, decentralization, security, scalability, and low cost of transactions. There is a huge market and opportunity for artists, venues and other entertainers to directly connect to fans with little to no middleman fees and markup, empowering more people to access their experiences, services and events. Our product will incorporate codified ethos to prevent common problems in the ticket and event services sector like scalping, misaligned reseller incentives, frontrunning, ticket transfer risk, proof of purchase, verifiable authenticity, and fair ticket payment plans.
Scalping: We will limit the number of orders that can be obtained within a certain time frame from any one purchasing address or account
Misaligned reseller incentives: We can provide an opt-in service to event organizers to algorithmically determine a fair price based on the proportion of tickets that are fully sold vs unsold, creating a fair value guarantee for ticket purchases.
Frontrunning: we will always be able to display the cost the reseller paid for the ticket to the buyer, reducing the chance for exorbitant markups. Accounts that are found to purchase tickets purely for the intent of selling at a profit will have their purchasing ability limited even further than the default scalping logic would enforce.
Ticket transfer risk: We can provide secure 3rd party escrow, with proof of funds and proof of ticket ownership to ensure neither party is a bad actor with malicious intent, while still transferring tickets quickly and cheaply.
Proof of purchase: A digital NFT can be generated with each ticket sale, so that even after the ticket is used and the event is past, the attendee can have a free memorabilia and badge to proudly collect and display.
Verifiable authenticity: We can leverage the blockchain to ensure no duplicate tickets are sold and that the tickets are indeed created by the provider of the event or an affiliate. If the provider elects to have an affiliate sales reward program, this will easily be trackable with payments disbursed in near real-time as well.
Fair ticket payment plans: A buyer of a ticket can enter into a contractual agreement to purchase a ticket in installments. Any buyer who fails to provide the funds in full by a predetermined date will automatically forfeit the ticket to auction, where it can be purchased for the difference between what has been paid and the remaining balance for non-sold out events, or auctioned to the highest bidder in the case the event is sold out. Any funds above the fair market price will be used to reimburse the original purchaser a portion or all of their funds.
Desired Outcome 2:
To make Cardano dapps accessible to the global population on iOS and android with rich native experiences
Blocking problem
Teams are having to keep up with innovation on the blockchain, and don't have resources to create mobile apps plus web clients.
Costs of the problem
Less adoption and accessibility for Cardano, especially in Mobile first continents like Africa and South America. The global economy was an estimated $84 Trillion in 2020, with North America only contributing a fraction of the total.
Evidence
<https://www.cnn.com/2012/10/04/tech/mobile/africa-mobile-opinion/index.html,>
<https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-07-19/more-chinese-use-internet-mobile-phones-computers,>
<https://medium.com/seedstars/mobile-and-internet-penetration-in-latin-america-part-1-541b8947b3f4,>
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/268750/global-gross-domestic-product-gdp/,>
<https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO>
We will create a base level app infrastructure that can easily conform to the basic needs of an enterprise grade app capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of users using the latest technology like GraphQL, React Native and TypeScript. This will expedite the time to market for many projects in development for Cardano. Our first partnership will be with a ticket sales and exchange platform that is also separately seeking funding in this round.
We will leverage many open source technologies to build a flexible application framework to help teams deploy their applications on mobile devices and reach the billions of people who only have internet access via a mobile device. This will free up resources for many existing projects to focus on smart contracts and web clients while driving adoption for all.
The entirety of the funding will go towards supporting the development of this project, by hiring ~3 frontend mobile developers who will work remotely for a duration of 1 year. Any excess funding will be used to pursue partnerships with additional projects and to support a coordinator role between the mobile app developers and dapp developers.
Our team believes that Cardano lack of real world usage can be solved by a new applications.
Our team believes that a NFT ticketing app would deliver the highest amount of value with the least amount of technical sophistication. This proposed solution is utilising the power of smart contracts and will increase utility & adoption of Cardano.
Our team is concerned with regulatory blocks. Our team is also concerned with adoption of the dApp by the cardano and other consumers but our team plans to overcome this with extensive marketing using our access to film and radio.