I checked the project a bit. it is very similar to aventus. Aventus collected really good amount in the crowd funding. I think there is a good market cap for ticketing platforms, because of it similar projects are coming day by day.
Hi Stavri, thanks for your interest! You are right in your assessment that there are some similarities with the Aventus ICO. There is some overlap in that Aventus also wants to provide a protocol/infrastructure that provides an internal primary and secondary market for ticket holders of a certain event. As finding similarities is quite easy, as both initiatives strive to solve the problems in the primary and secondary ticketing market I will focus on the differences in this post. I am not in any way trying to put Aventus down or criticize their approach/solution just want to provide you with my view on how these two companies are different.
Difference in execution / market penetrationGUTS was founded in 2016 and has been active in the market since. As of now, GUTS tickets employs 9 people of which 6 are developers, some of these team members are relatively new, some of them have been with GUTS for quite some time. Between 6/2016 and 6/2017 this team has predominantly been preoccupied with developing and testing a ticketing system that works and is able serve the needs of both the event organizer as of the consumer using the system (so usability and UX wise) Only after GUTS had gained this valuable market experience (for examples check our blog!) in the several pilots GUTS conducted the decision was made to do an ICO in order to accelerate the growth and further push toward more transparency and decentralization. With all these lessons gained by experience in mind, the GET-protocol white paper was written in the summer of 2017. At the moment of writing GUTS has an already live and operational product, with paying customers and a team that has formed organically of the course of 1.5 years. Everything described in the white paper comes from a very practical 'but will it actually work' perspective and less from a 'wouldn't it be cool if' angle. I am not saying the Aventus WP is written from that angle, just mainly pointing out the GUTS white paper and its proposed and partially already realized and tested solutions are written with the operational/practical nuances of the industry in mind. Also, GUTS has already gained experience in how to onboard customers in a bootstrap manner, something you won't necessarily learn when you start off all comfortable.
Difference in concept / solutionThe Aventus solution seems to have a heavy focus on putting tickets on a name, which will mean that everyone entering the venue will have to identify him or herself with an ID or credit card. While this is approach will prevent that tickets can be sold outside of the system (as the verifiers at the venue will be able to look up to whom the ticket is registered) if will be very costly both monetarily(in manpower needed for verification) as in processing time(everybody has to be checked 1 by 1) In the past, there have been several bands that have demanded that their tickets are sold on name (there still are bands that require that) and as such there are ticketing companies specialized in that type of ticketing (Friendly Fire for example) The solution you can see working in our sandbox environment(and tested during real events) is based on phone verification via SMS(other verification methods will be added soon) In the age of mobile tickets we believe that the printed out QR has had its time and is ready to be retired. Aventus has mentioned on their blog a few weeks ago that in some cases (lower value ticket) they would consider nesting the tickets in phones cache like GUTS but they still seem to prefer to put the tickets on the buys name. While I can see that one would find that this point is quite a straw-man argument (somebody more objective should access that) I really do think that this difference is one of the more important one's concept wise. Aventus did propose a quite intuitive revenue sharing structure in their white paper for the secondary market (so that the original seller would also profit from the sales on the secondary market) GUTS currently only lets people sell their ticket for the original price (the fact that we currently do this is again more operational, but still give credit where credit is due - it is a cool idea that also inspired us in a way)
That being said, I encourage any initiative that strives to make the ticketing market more fair and transparent. It would be a 'scarcity mindset' to presume that there is only room for one blockchain based ticketing solution. Ticketmaster sells more than 500 million tickets a year (
http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6890347/live-nation-2015-earnings-7-6-billion-revenue) and has a yearly revenue of more than 7 billion US dollars (in 2015) Competition (especially blockchain based solutions) will keep us sharp and innovative, in the end it all about execution and we sure as hell are ready for it
As mentioned you can verify everything I said by visiting our blog on Medium (
https://blog.guts.tickets/), try out our Sandbox(
https://sandbox.guts.tickets/) or research the 'realness/seriousness' of our clients for yourself! If you have any questions let me know.