VenuesNow (11/17/22) Zoltak, James
The recent news of cryptocurrency exchange FTX filing for bankruptcy will likely raise concerns about the underlying blockchain platform. True Tickets CEO Matt Zarracina says the technology is sound for live event ticketing and that it offers benefits over legacy systems. "Those that are building blockchain-enabled solutions, what you are seeing now is much more of a focus on the outcome, of solving the problem at an industry level, at a user level, and it's getting back to almost basic product management," he said. Zarracina predicted that blockchain will increasingly operate behind the scenes, while True Tickets' prospects have continued to improve with new partnerships, clients and offerings. "We released a major new feature, rules-based ticket sharing, the first of its kind in the industry, and it's having a pretty significant impact with our clients," he said. "We're still mitigating unwanted secondary market activity, but our venues are getting and sharing patron data on ticket sharing. We're averaging, for about every three tickets shared, one new registration or new name in our clients' databases and we should hit 100,000 tickets shared across our 11 to 12 clients by the end of this month, and it's been live for about three and a half months. We're pretty excited about the future and how it's working." Zarracina added that letting clients facilitate ticket sharing under enforceable rules is a forerunner to a rules-based marketplace for resales, "and that's where what we built becomes really powerful." IBM has also said it would continue to invest in blockchain technology.
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