dApp Market for Tickets and Events

Create a dapp marketplace for direct ticket sales, split payments, and automated reselling auctions enforced by smart contracts.

Enterprise Grade App Developers with contributions to open source, connections to music industry producers, labels & performers, Plutus Pioneers, 20+ of years experience in software engineering, 15+ of years DEVOPS expertise, counseled by Business Advisors F4-F7 Project Managers

[IMPACT]

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://www.benzinga.com/news/21/07/21937648/global-entertainment-industry-to-generate-2-6-trillion-in-revenues-by-2025 report#:~:text=The%20global%20entertainment%20and%20media,as%20fueling%20this%20new%20vibranc

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.

[FEASIBILITY]

Roadmap 1:

In the first month, we will finalize our agreements with the talent required to develop the smart contracts, create a more granular map of the work to be done and begin to code. Our initial focus will be on creating the underlying smart contracts and a simple web client, while the mobile team that has submitted their own proposal works on building out a full-fledged enterprise grade iOS and android app. This will allow us to reach the majority of the world's population despite many citizens having a mobile device with internet access, yet no computer, while also supporting access from a wide variety of end clients, regardless of browser or operating system. We will leverage an open source cross-platform mobile development platform for this task (React & React Native). The founding team has extensive experience using open source technologies to develop, launch and maintain enterprise grade web and mobile applications used by hundreds of thousands of users monthly.

By month three we aim to have begun testing and vetting the foundational smart contracts to enable interacting with the ticket platform. This includes listing, purchasing, and transferring ownership of the tickets. We will then turn our attention to the more sophisticated smart contracts that will differentiate our platform from legacy providers, enabled by the Cardano blockchain.

By month six we will provide additional functionality empowered by smart contracts as outlined above, like built-in scalper/bot detection and rejection, split payment contracts, and a reseller system.

Roadmap 2:

1 month: Begin scaffolding out the base layer app, with considerations for an enterprise grade environment, such as staging/production/mock environments, authentication and navigation.

3 month: By the end of month three, we will have developed a modular and flexible component library without any strong design decisions so that it can be extended for a variety of brand needs and use cases in the future.

6 month: In 6 months time we will have integrated the components into the first version of the application for our first dapp partner (a ticket marketplace), set up continuous deployment and integration, and ship the first version of the client to the iOS and Android app stores. We will also have extended the basic architecture of the app for considerations such as accessibility, integrated it with the backend services to talk to the smart contracts and communicate data between the client and the server.

12 months: By month 12 we will have iterated and expanded on the initial design and feature set of the first partner app (ticket marketplace), as well as expanded documentation for the basic application framework and component library, including providing an open source repository for other Cardano Dapp projects to leverage to get their project on mobile quicker. Important to note is the same basic app architecture can also be used to make native apps on apple WatchOS, macOS, Windows, and a variety of smart TV operating systems such as Samsung Tizen and AndroidTV. It will also support reverse compiling into web apps, allowing teams to potentially use just one code base to ship a native client to almost any operating system widely used today. The first app should launch around June 2022, with the open source framework being available to others by December 2022.

Budget: The primary use of the budget will be to fund dedicated remote developers to create the required smart contracts, plus a simple web client to facilitate more rapid iteration and testing. Additional funds may be sought in a later round of fundraising to establish partnerships with venues and entertainment companies, as well as for marketing initiatives. There is a separate proposal to fund mobile developers to develop a client app, empowering those around the world access on mobile devices, which is the dominant way citizens of the globe access the web. We would like to devote full time developers to this project, and estimate 1 full stack web developer, and 2 smart contract developers, plus a project manager will be sufficient at this stage for phase one. We are seeking $150,000 to hire and fund these roles for a 3-6 month time period (length depending on full or part time).

Richard Gordon: CEO of Merchify, Professional Coder, Cardano Community Ambassador

https://www.linkedin.com/in/richgordon13

Gavin Briggs Perez: Founder of Defi Discussions LLC Project Manager & F7 Fund Recipient

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavin-briggs-perez-163330a5/

Jose Velazquez: CEO Defi Discussions LLC, Project Manager, Asset Acquisition Manager, F7 Fund Recipient

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-velazquez-809665186/

Will Shelton: Film Director & Professional Theater Services

Richard Lago: International Logistics, Digital Marketing & Marketing Manager

Nathan Samson: Latte Swap Co-Founder & F5, F6, and F7 Project Manager

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-samson-419349135/

Craig Tibber: Professional Film Director & 10 plus years of film experience

Humberto Bacquerizo: (Advisor) MentorU CEO. Educational Specialist at New Jersey Medical School. Hispanic Commissioner of the City of Newark. Author: "Hispanic Star Rising Volume II"

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hxbed/

Moto Oba: Fortune 500 Business Consultant, Merchify co-Founder, Cardano Community Ambassador

Mit Patel: Professional Coder, Project Manager, Digital Security, Multilingual

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitpatel717/

Techademia team members (Ayllu)

[AUDITABILITY]

Our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the first 6 months of the project will include shipping an initial version of the web client, deploying multiple iterations of the smart contracts on the Cardano Testnet, and beginning to integrate with the mobile client frontend for android and iOS.

Our year 1 KPIs will be to successfully deploy our vetted contracts to the Cardano mainnet, acquire at least 1 partnership with a venue or event organizer, and list tickets for sale to at least 1 pilot event. Our anticipated launch date would be August 2022.

This project will be deemed successful if we bring to market a low-cost, frictionless experience to the end user to allow more people to enrich their lives with virtual and in person experiences from performing arts to business conventions, while empowering a more direct sales approach from artists and venues to attendees.

Success for this project will be to partner with at least one existing Cardano project and working with them to bring a mobile application to market (we already have identified a potential initial partner, a ticket marketplace and exchange, which is also seeking funding in this round), while creating a basic framework that can be reused for other partners in the future. Our primary KPI will be to release one well-designed, accessible, performant and user-friendly cross-platform (iOS and android) app for a partner Dapp project. Our secondary KPI will be to form a second partnership and develop documentation for other projects to easily leverage the work we have done, by open-sourcing the foundation of the initial app to bring subsequent projects to market on iOS and android quicker and more easily, with many edge cases and enterprise production environment considerations already handled. We expect the secondary KPI to be hit in the 12 month timeframe, after we successfully ship version one of the first partner project. We believe this will impact the Cardano ecosystem by removing much of the redundant work required to make an enterprise grade native mobile client application, helping the ecosystem to be reached by more people, with more projects much faster. By leveraging our experience to provide this foundation to others we can grow the community faster and provide higher quality mobile apps as an ecosystem with less total resources.

An entirely new one

SDG Rating

SDG goals:

Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

SDG subgoals:

4.4 By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship

4.b By 2020, substantially expand globally the number of scholarships available to developing countries, in particular least developed countries, small island developing States and African countries, for enrolment in higher education, including vocational training and information and communications technology, technical, engineering and scientific programmes, in developed countries and other developing countries

8.6 By 2020, substantially reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

4.4.1 Proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill

4.b.1 Volume of official development assistance flows for scholarships by sector and type of study

8.6.1 Proportion of youth (aged 15–24 years) not in education, employment or training