Episode 162- Aventus: Blockchain-based event Ticke

Welcome to Crypto Knights. Will we help you finally make sense of the trending world of cryptocurrencies? So get your virtual piggy bank and let's get started. Alan and Anika, welcome to Crypto Knights. We're just so excited to have you both as guest speakers today on our podcast. Thanks for having me. Fantastic. Yeah, I get very excited. You know, most of the time we have these episodes

where we are talking to founders that are in launch their ICO in the middle of it and all of that. And occasionally we have had people come back and then others who have given us updates on, you know, ICO is the thing of the past. Let me tell you what business as usual is. So I actually look forward to this because at the end of the

day, ICO is the beginning of the journey, not the end of it, right? But regardless, you guys were among the early ones in 2070. Congratulations. You had a successful sales September of last year. But I just want to hand it over to you guys to maybe give us a little bit of your personal backgrounds, back stories, and then we'll jump into eventers. Yeah. For sure. So

this really started out for us in university. Both Anika and I were doing our master's degree. I was doing mine in machine learning or artificial intelligence. Anika was doing particle physics. So we came from quite technical backgrounds. We'd worked on a couple projects together already. And then when we saw a few interviews released in in late 2015, we thought this is the next big wave of

blockchaining that's being called. So yeah, we just kind of finished up our degrees published. I did my thesis on film rights distribution on the block chain with FFDA and the BBC. That we finished up sort of in June. Incorporated eventers in April 2016 moved towards a small BC round and invested in the end of that year, so around September time. And then we actually took a

year to do our white paper, do all the prep and the build up. And until we eventually launched our rights here in September 2017, we're very successful in a couple of minutes, hitting our targets. And since then, we've really been building up the business. Oh, that's fantastic. Congratulations. How about you, Anika? What is your story? Yeah, yeah. So I quite an international background. Primarily Italian did

my master's like Alan was saying in physics with particle physics. I was doing my thesis at Surn looking at machine learning base decays of pig's bosons, which is quite technical. But I mean, ultimately it was it was quite cool because Alan and I started working together for a university project on a Bitcoin price prediction. And we were doing this kind of in 2015 when the price

was around like $300 or something, which we'd catch some but whatever. But yeah, no, it was it was really good and started working together when we like look. If you're in. Started becoming they, you know, they did their sale and everything like that. And we started looking at it and we were like, wow, this is the new internet. You know, it's going to be the next

backbone of everything. And we need to get in there. And there's so many domains that can be. You know, I don't want to say disrupted, but change by this. And yeah, we want to be a part of it. So that's that's kind of where we came from. You know, what I found was it's one thing to figure out that there's a major trend going on. But

it is also equally hard to find the starting point. If you rewind back to Amazon, the early days, we say, wow, what a brilliant guy in a prospect that he started off with books because books have the same shape. There's no differential in quality. I mean, you know, what you're ordering for, what the price is. So in a prospect, there were 10 or 20 reasons why

that was a brilliant idea, brilliant use case. And he started off and then grew from there. Understand that. So when I fast forward and look at what you both have done with event. So in going to all the information I'm sitting here and I'm saying, how did you pick that use case? I'm from the bag loud that you guys did, right? Machine learning and particle physics.

And that's a ticketing fraud is the right thing. I mean, I like it. As I get a gap there. And in retrospect, again, the same way it looks brilliant. Right. And you have this whole protocol. It just makes a lot of sense when you look back, but looking forward. How did you guys find that? Yeah. I think we're really going to give a lot of credit

to Professor William Lutton about the director of the cryptocurrency research and engineering center at Imperial. So he's really who started us properly down this route and he had the connections with a lot of people in entertainment. And when he gave us, for me, in particular, the various sort of options for my master's thesis, I really thought that the film stuff was particularly interesting. The properties applied

really well. So that's where it started. But then maybe you can. Yeah, I would have pulled from there. Yeah, after his thesis, we were like, look, let's just let's try and turn this into a business. And it. You know, the film might think, I mean, we were just so early and people didn't know what Bitcoin was. Let alone blockchain, you know. So to explain it like

that, it was just too much. And people weren't getting their heads around it. They didn't see the value. And. Yeah. So, you know, after our thesis, we decided to turn it into a business. And we decided to generalize it a bit and make it kind of general film and music streaming. And when we were trying to get into the market. It was really difficult because people

didn't know what Bitcoin was, let alone blockchain. So to explain all of that and then explain smart contracts, it was like, you know, an hour in, they still had no idea what was going on. And yeah, I mean, it ended up being quite a big legal problem, ultimately. And what we realized when we're doing our market research was live music was such a huge market. And

it was growing. And actually the revenue for artists from streaming was going down because of, you know, these big platforms and stuff like that that have weird ways of distributing revenue for stream. And so ultimately we moved over to live. We realized, wow, you know, we'd suffer problems from counterfeit tickets, thousand tickets, you know, on sales closing out in like a minute and not having any

access to tickets. And we saw, wow, this is such a perfect use case for the blockchain, for a public blockchain, especially. And that's how we started on that route. Right. And the genius of your approach was that the vision or the way you looked at it like, you know, some like the doctor looks at the next way and see things that we don't see kind of

a thing. So you both saw that, hey, we can look at these. Tickets and look at them as a transient currency. It's a currency that's created for an event and then it vanishes after that. So I thought that was like a wow moment for me as I was going through your information. Is that kind of how you guys connected cryptocurrency is to ticket sales? And you

said, this is kind of like currency or how did that come about? Yeah, I think I would really started. I think I said for weeks on end in a road met at Imperial trying to so we both just got our master's thesis. So we had our academic heads on right. So we were sitting there analyzing the market fundamentally trying to draw back onto the abstraction of

what a ticket really is. And we came to the conclusion that all you're really doing is that it's a market around permission management. And the permission is the right to access the venue. And building on that and looking at the various problems, we just really approached it as a as a research task. So we didn't have any industry specific knowledge. We weren't from the ticketing industry.

So give us the ability to look at it with a fresh set of eyes. Now, this is a very nice one. This wasn't all good. This is this list. Obviously, so various problems, but also at times we made mistakes from just fundamentally misunderstanding how the industry worked. It really was a process of refining with experts and various people who joined our company over time. You really

get a person. That's fantastic. So if we can now have you layout the events that have happened over the past six months in terms of your progress. And maybe you could deconstruct it along technology lines of as the technology development the team. And then the business community, how have these progress so far. And and then along the way you could probably give us stories about use

cases that you've seen happen in your space. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, we so after our sale in September, we started growing the team. This include this is mainly tech. So we're about 25 people in total now mainly in the UK. But now we're starting out in the US. Some big announcements coming soon that we can't really say, but they're, you know, they're being papered

right now. And basically what we did is we grew up the tech team with blockchain team, front and team, back and team, grew those out, started building the protocol. And then some of the middleware on top, because as you know, would be to be all the way through. That's something really different about our approach. Compared to everyone else in the market, because, you know, you know

us now, we're tech and academics. We're not ticketing people. And we don't want to be arrogant and assume we know about ticketing. We know we can build the software and the bridge to the blockchain really well or ticketing companies. So, we started building out the software teams to build these middleware build the protocol main net release was yesterday. So we actually have our live V1 protocol

on the main net. And we've got a marketing team being built up. We've had a few private trials over the time. We've won a lot of clients, for example, using our products, like towns and music. And, you know, we have quite a few trials now coming in the summer as well with this live network. We have our centralized scaling solution finish and tested. We're ready to

go. And now we're moving to a multi centralized scaling solution. And yeah, with some pretty big announcements for some big allocations. We're going to be doing really soon and we're super excited to share it. So it's really progressed nicely. The main net was released yesterday. You said, yeah. Congratulations. This is like a major moment in the, I mean, this is like a history making moment, to

be honest with you guys. This is probably something you've been working on for months. And this congratulations. And is this the first podcast you guys are doing after the main net? Yeah, he's got the exclusive. Oh, I didn't know Kiprolyte was so lucky that we got you guys on board. Probably got to sell out episode. It's really, really, really, really happy with everything so far. Awesome.

Fantastic. And using it on the main net, everything seems to be running very smoothly right now. So we're really happy about it. Well, then let's let's lay it out. Think about the main net and what people can look forward to doing from here on forward. And let's make this an FAQ product podcast. The most revisited podcast that you guys have. Yeah, awesome. So, yeah. Sorry, this

is. All right. So tell us about the main net release. What are the implications of that? What can we look forward to? Yeah. So the first things will be, we're doing a lot of some private proof. Concepts right now that we're not going to be talking about very publicly, but everybody will be able to see the sort of traffic going on within the network itself. And

slowly, but she'll be releasing various apps and decentralized applications so that people can interact with or use a friendly way with these smart contracts. We have our first major issue. We'll be doing a really big allocation of tickets with the answer happening now in August. So that's probably the biggest, most exciting thing that will be the public announcement in the next few weeks for people to

see this point to go really tight with that and show its power in the industry. But yeah, I mean, so the use cases we have today in our approach goal, you know, as Navy T holder. What you can do is you can, you can vote on changes to the protocol. So in an advisory capacity, you can say like, oh, this poor request was really good. I

think you need that you guys need to feature. There's some problems with this and gas costs to hide whatever it is. You can, you can take part in voting and proposing changes so that it's a lot more decentralized. And then the second thing you can do is you can vote on the legitimacy of events. As you probably know, with this network, with this baseline protocol, if

anyone can be adding direct to command line, you don't know whether there are human machine of group whoever can create events, they spam up the network. They make us look bad. If there are sales channels that are pulling inventory from the protocol, they start losing customers because they're selling tickets to Justin Bieber's playing in my base. And that's the reason why he's not. So we have

this whole due diligence mechanism around the events. And that has been we that's going. There's going to be a doubt coming out soon. And AVT holders can start interacting with these events and starting to perform due diligence on the network. And that's kind of our vision for the coin. It's due diligence mechanism for the industry, for the entertainment industry. Set up events, set up the ticket

for social to put those events and start selling them. And then obviously on the other end, be able to sort of redeem them and whatever access control solution they have at the door for the venue. So basically everything to do all the way around, even on the secondary market, we have the ability for people to whitelist the participants that they're happy with. And kind of blacklist

others that they would like to get involved in the space. So can we talk a little bit about that? A little bit about, is it an event organizer that would be interested in coming and setting up the event on event. So it depends. Like the way. So obviously we built on that aware. With scaling solutions, we handle all the gas costs. You know, we we we

basically have this thin layer on top that exposes rest APIs to ticketing companies. The way our commercial and the auto targets is promoters. So you can kind of event organizers, but mainly. So ticketing companies, so primary agents and letting them set up their inventory by the protocol. You can of course come direct to protocol and sidetrack everything as an event organizer. We've had interest from like

university students, for example, for hosting some of their events, etc. They just want to come direct to protocol, maybe through a gap they can they can do that too. Really what what the event is protocol is aimed at being is the back bone that sits behind the whole supply chain in the events industry. So there's value that can be added to your anybody along the chain.

So we are just wants to go direct to fan in a more secure and convenient manner. That's something that has a lot of popularity. If it's the promoter who's putting on the event, dealing with the venue, they are able to control the inventory and create operational oversight as it moves sort of through the supply chain. The primary agents have various ways of distributing their tickets in

a most decentralized or the dissemination of ticket sales. The secondary guys also have more control over how the ticketing industry is dealt with. And finally, when we get to access control at the venue, we have abilities to do crypto tickets where you've now got maybe a stronger identity component associated with the ticket. If that's what you're looking for or at least completely getting rid of any

ability to counterfeit tickets and make the whole event going to experience better for the consumer at the end of the day. I think that was explained really well because ultimately we really don't want to be opinionated. About how people work in the industry. We don't want to say like, no touting, no secondary, you know, like, that's not our business. We just want to give you the

tools to control the market and exert whatever rules you want around your inventory. We don't care what those rules are. We just help you implement them. Yeah, that's why you're a protocol. And you do the fundamental that are necessary to say this event is real. These tickets are real kind of a thing. And that's one each in itself. So the point is that you're going to

have to be able to get the ticket to the market. The promotion, the selling of the tickets, etc. You're leaving it to the ticketing agencies themselves. Correct. You're not involved in that. We will never be to see. So we don't want to compete with the existing industry on taking up ticketing infantry or having a monopoly on that data. We're really the plumbing the AWS of ticketing.

You might to help facilitate the industry and give them this new technology to leverage and ultimately give a better experience to the artists. And the clients and the fans, the technical shows. What we do that do though, as part of the protocol on the marketing and distribution side is we build. We built nice tools that people can leverage to distribute their tickets in new ways. Maybe

you can like, it's much easier to set up a sales channel now. Pull tickets from the protocol. Abate the rules and start distributing tickets. So think the news outlet, a blog, a YouTube video and influence. All of these people could be trick ticket distributors. And because some of these new types of distribution have such targeted demographics, you can now reach a much more targeted audience with

your event. And so providing those tools and letting people leverage these kind of new internet age way of doing things is something that we intend to do. But like Alan said, never actually get involved in sell tickets ourselves. So if a ticketing agency is looking at event as what would be the motivators, why should they sign on to event as immediately? What are the benefits? Yeah.

So we're doing this. And have sort of three cool areas that we typically say, journey. So try and be agent for promote. So number one is control and operational oversight on your internship. So what this means is you can now enforce whatever rules you like. Essentially putting your tickets up in this pool of inventory. They think what it can tap into is setting up your rules

layer with the smart contract facilitated by the event as a protocol. So let's say you can only resell your technical 10% on face value. Any kind of restrictions they can imagine on that front. And then they let this pool go. And either they can manually choose who the sales channels are as the industry does today. Or they can even have a component. And this has been

interested some of the biggest players in the studio is spoken to where they just open it up and anybody can do ticket sales on that allocation. But obviously adhering to the rules that they originally set. So that's the first sort of core value out around control and operational transparency. The second one is data. Just making sure that they know every single person who touches their tickets

has its which hands exactly who that person is when they receive the ticket to make sure that they are actually legitimately interested in the better way of marketing to them. And finally, they're obviously interesting ways of financing different events and shows using the blockchain. Given interesting models around sort of fan club. So any of this scarcity represented and the sort of factors that people going to

miss out on events. How would the buyer of the tickets are their benefits for them? For sure. Data monetization. I mean, in each of those points, they benefit. So in terms of the control. The ticket buyer themselves now has a transparent understanding of what the rules associated with that ticket. Because one of the biggest problems now is you buy ticket has these terms and conditions. You

don't even know about suddenly you don't have the ticket anymore. And you're wondering why and you have to read a 10 page document. The rules here are ingrained into the ticket itself. So you always know what's happening. The second thing is, you know, artist director fan, for example, or these fan club models, you get rewards for helping out the artists or promoting the event. Maybe you

get a free ticket because you invite the 10 other people to come, whatever it is. And the third thing is the data monetization side of things. Every time that switches hands and the promotes against more data, they can request data from you. But you can you can sell it back to them. We don't we don't want it to be, you know, them pulling things and it

being completely almost monotonous. And they're also being monopolistic and incorporate versus consumer. We want the consumer to also benefit from the value they're adding to the corporations. And their ability to to to to let them target people better. From your data. And who else. Are there any other ecosystem players that benefit from the model? Yeah. So I mean, this would really help. Obviously the artists. They

don't have that ways of engaging with their fans. And it's in the ways of getting the industry. I'm seeing exactly what is happening with it. It's also helpful for venues because they again enforce more of the calculus associated with the ticket and just have great oversight. It's more efficient because nowadays what does actually a funny story with some of the promoters at the venues and stuff

work. So what they will do is half the time they're sending around Excel spreadsheets if they're advanced. If not, we heard of some of the players fact that they're accessing each other allocations and tickets. And they'll get it like midnight the night before everybody will work with six hours before. And everybody shows up the next day at in the evening. So it's really a bit of

a mess on that front. And that can that can help on that side as well. And then obviously the second be players can also have more control and tighter restrictions. Make sure they don't exactly what the rules the most. Great. Got it. So now that we understand all of that. And I think the fact that the minute has just been released. So we've done a lot

of private trials and stuff mainly on the test nets. So the behavior is almost the same as the main net except it costs us. But yes, correct. For a proper on sale on the public main net, we have not actually done anything yet. But some private trials are coming up. And people will be able to track that activity on the protocol in a smart contract. So

I need to say, I'm not going to say that. So literally you're open for business now and people could start on building. Exactly. Exactly. And that's super exciting. And how do how does event is make money? How do token holders make? I mean, I'm talking about the business model. I'm not talking about any predictions. Yeah. I'm just talking about what is a model. Yeah. So one

thing that's super key in our design of the token is if you want to benefit from the utility of the network, you must interact with it and give it utility. So if you want to support from the network, you have to promote events. You have to vote and take part in the due diligence process around events. You have to advise on the protocol. You know, you

have to take part in the network. In terms of the business model for the protocol foundation, we're a nonprofit through and through. We don't intend to take any revenue or take any revenue from the protocol activity itself. Just open source. We help fund businesses building on the protocol and developing the ecosystem. Our commercial entity that we're going to be doing is we also work with called

Artos. The business model there is because you know, it's that I ask infrastructure as a service or software as a service. We really want to be that AWS. So we charge based on usage. I guess there's no ticket sales. It's not per ticket. It's per API request. So that's that's kind of how we price and that's our business model. And I think I understand with Artos

on that plant is where it's the bridge to blockchain. What we're really trying to do is deal with some of the shortcomings that they could not initially buy a memo today. So for example, and for non-self, we'll be doing 150,000 tickets allocation to something like that that sells out in 10 minutes. Maybe you need to be able to handle much higher scale. So that's the kind

of services and the practice and the value. And we provide and monetize on the commercial side. Another example would need to follow up associated with tokens. A lot of the sort of public companies that we're dealing with don't want to hold any tokens. So we build them in. We understand that fiat currencies and then we internally take care of the kind of forage risk exposure that

goes with the difference of cryptocurrencies needed to address. Got it. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is it looks like somebody who's a frequent attendee to various types of events that are on. And mentors would be the kind of person that should consider owning every team. For example, yeah, for sure. I mean, for us, we think that part of us have a lot

more monetization opportunities. They should be able to take part in the formation of these events. And the marketing of these events, for example, by taking part in the due diligence, it's not fair that sometimes times get ripped off by an event not happening last minute. And then not getting their refunds for the tickets back when maybe they knew from the beginning that it looked like a

slightly dodgy event, they should be able to take part in that and they should be able to help secure the industry from those kinds of fraudulent people. We also, too, sort of point that we do do, so as it stands, the industry is not particularly willing to accept crypto currencies for payments for tickets, for example. So currently what we're doing is everything off-chain with the payments

of a provider component, but as the market sort of matures, the protocol is designed to handle ticket sales in our token ABT. So obviously that's a good reason to get involved, but also any other ERC-20 token or Ether. It would be really great event as to be a platform and an infrastructure that others want to build on specifically, another blockchain companies. So we're trying to keep

it open on that point as to what exactly is used as the medium of exchange. Yeah, but actually what's also worth mentioning is for some of our big scale proof of concepts this summer, we're going to be doing an allocation in ABT. So you will be able to buy tickets as an ABT holder with ABT, you'll get discounts, you'll get rewards, it'll be awesome. And are

the individual event related tickets themselves? Yeah, see, 20 tokens or how are the individual tickets for a specific event? Yeah. Yeah. So currently we represent them more abstractly, because we don't want them to trade on any of the exchanges as it stands. In the future, what it will be is probably a combination of ERC-20, it's probably not ideal because we need a degree of fundability tickets,

we need to know which ones which show. I think it's ERC-721, that is the sort of more fundable tokens, and that's the design that we'll be going forward. But it always been an option, like we mentioned, where we provided tools to people to use as they see fit. So that tool sent itself, they can choose to use the standard or they can just use it in

the more abstract form that we currently have an avoid trade. Yeah, which makes a lot of sense, which is the reason why you call yourself a protocol, rather than a DAP. So because you're kind of allowing all of these ticketing agencies to come on board plug-in, and actually, in a sense, roll out their own transient tokens, if I might use a word. So these have a

beginning and an ending in a short time frame. I'm imagining that when the event ends, those tokens are gone and redeemed. And also returns, are you allowing returns? Of course, again, we give the tools to allow that. That's what I meant. Do you give tools to allow that? Yeah, no, no. Yeah, no, for sure. And we're really keen on the ERC-721, making that work with the

tickets. And using what Polymath did for secure-sized ERC-20 tokens, something very similar for ERC-721, so that actually even maybe exchanges could start listing tickets. And under certain rules, facilitate trading of these tickets. So that's definitely something that's coming for this first version. We're keeping it fairly simple and not implementing that. But as appetite grows, that's going to come. But for returns, as you were mentioning, that's

difficult today. When obviously we have the traditional payment service provider component there, and they do returns in a standard way, but obviously, as more and more of this moves on the chain, there'll be a much greater degree of control over this, with sending that money back and it's growing. They'll need to know how to interact with small contracts, deal with gas, deal with the products, exposure,

scaling, et cetera, et cetera. If they come through a commercial and see autos, they'll need some basic web development skills to integrate our APIs into their kind of e-commerce front end. But we also have like white label apps and stuff for like the ticket wallet that will probably open source as well that they can just use and put their content on. And they don't even need

necessarily mobile development for ticket access. But yeah, I mean, you know, it's basic API calls. So basic web development stuff that they would need to integrate this for sure. It's like your equivalent of the iPhone App Store. You have an App Store with pre-built apps that can be pulled together to launch their own event. Exactly. Yeah. So it's a combination of APIs and white labels, sort

of software solutions that they can use and brand in the ways that they see set. We try and make it as easy as possible to integrate this very sort of technical space. Yeah. One thing we do, we just make sure to stay away from this. We don't want to be building even white labels. We call them as platforms. You know, people need their own one like

that. You know, you need your own like ticket marketplace or whatever. We can recommend partners who provide these things. But we don't ourselves. So as a decoding company, I could either do everything myself. I just going directly onto this platform or come to autos and say, Hey, I don't want to do any of this. Can you do it for me? That's what I'm doing in South

Dakota. But I understand that. That's phenomenal. I'm glad you guys, you thought we had about that. And that's what I'm doing. So we started approaching the industry. It really became clear that there was that problem. And I think that problem actually exists in blockchain, not just in ticketing, but across the various protocols. Because we have some amazing stuff happening on the protocol level. But there's a

definite disconnect between what is commercially viable right now and what is actually being created on the blockchain. And we call that gap. That's why we branded art. I says the bridge to blockchain because it's really getting over that gap, not just for the events as protocol, but also others in the future. I think, yeah, fundamentally, that's a great idea. So are there other points you want

to tell our listeners that are important? Maybe I did not ask all the questions you wanted me to. No, I think you're, first of all, your questions were really good. So I was some, I was some time speaking to you on this on this podcast. But look, just to listen us out there who are interested. Please join our communities, join our telegram, you know, follow us

on Twitter, join our Reddit. And we've got guys talking on there all the time. We talk about what we do, we do AMAs, and all kinds of things like that. So if you have any questions, we would love to have a chat with you and talk to you about what we're doing. And if you want to get involved in anyway, either as a network participant, a

developer, join the team, please, please reach out. And what is your website? What is your telegram ID? Yeah, so our website is just eventist.io or our trust on I.O. if you're looking for that sort of thing. And then I believe telegram is just not a fantastic. Well, we are just super excited that this was a history in the making moment in the life of your business.

And certainly we show the very best. And I hope people, you know, I request all the business. Don't just listen to this. Share this with all your fellow people that are interested in events. I think that's a big thing. As you said, the trend is upwards in that area. And they're all connected to each other. So I think there's a great opportunity. Thanks for listening to

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