Disclaimer: This blog post serves as a guide into the thrilling journey ahead for OPEN. We acknowledge that some may have felt a sense of uncertainty following the migration to OPN. However, we want to assure you that OPN is not the end, but a vibrant new beginning. With exciting plans on the horizon like a based L3 blockchain and major exchange listings, we're just getting started. Nonetheless, while we're eager to share our roadmap, we must remind you that this is a dynamic process. Strategies could evolve based on new opportunities, market changes, and other factors. As we navigate this exciting landscape together, remember that flexibility and adaptability are key. Onwards and upwards!
Introduction - OPEN season
OPEN is here. After a frenzy of a rebranding period, we can finally look ahead at the times to come. This blog serves as an insight into our strategic considerations and the opportunities that we see for our project, tooling, community and token over the next several years.
You will notice that the scope is widening from facilitating individual ticket sales to bigger use-cases and disruptive features, as well as further cementing our foothold in the crypto space. The recent rebrand was not without reason - our new positioning suits our growing ambitions and clears the way for exponential growth.
Today we are at the 6 million ticket mark and quickly ramping up to 60 million, but we are exploring various other crypto-centric opportunities that can shape and grow the project.
Although it’s not nearly everything we are working on, we’ll contain ourselves to the following topics:
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Business growth & strategy
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The potential of an L3
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Multi-chain approach
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Onchain secondary market
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RWA Event Financing
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OPN Token
Business growth & strategy
Let’s be real: our size is not (yet) size. Since 2016 we have gone from an average of a few hundred tickets a month to our current average of 150,000 monthly onchain tickets. While awesome and, appreciating the fact that a lot of blood, sweat and tears were shed in the process of making this happen, there is a long way to go in terms of traditional ticket numbers.
Please allow a brief, very reductive timeline of our strategy from start to current date:
2016 - 2019: The initial years were spent gaining insights & market demand to create a superior ticketing service on a per event basis. Ending scalping and unwanted resale while simplifying the process of buying a ticket. Build, fail, tweak, succeed, repeat.
2019 - 2023: With the basics down on what the ticketing experience should look like, we zoomed in on reliably facilitating events at larger (10k+ attendees) venues and white-labeling our tooling to dozens of start-ups around the world. This helped us see the challenges faced by creators globally and laid the groundwork for new opportunities such as Event Financing.
2024 & beyond: Now it’s all about taking what we learned and implementing it on the highest stage. Shifting our focus from singular events to onboarding renowned ticketeers onchain, integrating into consumer-facing infrastructure and working with established organizations in new verticals on their Web3 strategies. All the while expanding the scope and nature of our services.
What about the largest onboarding event?
Our token migration promises and significant client onboarding projections remain intact. The new roadmap and L3 announcement are not substitutes for these promises. We're actively working towards these major catalysts.
The large catalysts we hinted at aren't about merely adding a new artist or venue. They're about integrating OPN into a broader existing ecosystem at scale. This is a significant shift in scale and organization structure. Although this materializing is taking longer than expected, this will be a groundbreaking onboarding event in the web3 world.
The migration was the starting point, not the destination
The transition from GET to OPN symbolizes the launch of a new era. We are constructing a diverse event and entertainment ecosystem, in which OPN serves as the critical lifeblood. The ticketing module is merely one access point to this expansive world. Prepare for OPN, more than a token, it's the nucleus of a dynamic, evolving ecosystem.
Time to think bigger
The unveiling of these significant catalysts urged us to rethink our product. It allowed us to envision beyond merely a protocol and to consider a larger, more expansive scope. It's worth noting that the most successful L1s have an onboarding entity propelling them forward. For example, BNB has Binance, and Base has Coinbase.
The blockchains these companies champion are not perse technically unique, their success is driven by the backing entities and team that know how to get users to their platform. As they can deliver users, their chain becomes interesting for projects and developers to build on their chain.
With the catalysts and onboards we have coming up, we anticipate being in the position the same for the entertainment, event, and fan communities.
Bigger, better, bolder
Using our experience and client relations we are well positioned to take large scale organizations from 0 to 1 in their journey to taking their operations onchain. This takes time and handholding, but the outcome is all the more rewarding.
At the same time we will be focussing more on turning crypto audiences into users of the OPEN infrastructure. We are eyeing partnerships and integrations with selected marketplaces, as well as the shipping of native onchain ticketing features that drive the decentralization of our tooling.
What to expect
In the coming weeks, we will be launching a testnet L3 on Base. This marks the beginning of our strategic shift to align our main accounting layer with an ecosystem that resonates more powerfully with our vision and goals.
As part of this transition, a portion of the POL liquidity will start moving to Base (in addition we are exploring other types of LP like Aerodrome and are looking into a campaign . This may result in some changes in liquidity in the short term, but we want to assure our users that this is a calculated and deliberate move, integral to our long-term roadmap.
While Ethereum has served us well and continues to have a broad user base, we believe that Base is more closely aligned with our objectives. It offers a vibrant ecosystem with considerable mindshare, liquidity, and a user base that is actively engaged in real-world applications delivering tangible utility.
Onchain ticketing summer
Our shift to Base is more than a technical decision; it's a strategic one. It's about positioning ourselves in an ecosystem that not only aligns with our current needs but also holds the promise of fulfilling our evolving requirements as we continue to grow and innovate.
The OPN L3: A chain for all event, ticket and entertainment to come together
Our OPN L3 is set to become a vital access point for projects and companies aiming to reach event and ticket users. Mirroring how Base rose to popularity through its user-centric experience and seamless integration with Coinbase Wallet, our L3 will offer an open environment for other projects to build and innovate. This will create a unique opportunity for direct interaction with our extensive user base.
Within this setup, OPN will evolve beyond its current role as ticketing fuel. It will become the essential element required to conduct transactions or deploy and interact with smart contracts on the L3, thus expanding its utility within this environment.
Drawing parallels with the success of Arbitrum, which became a hub for DeFi applications thanks to the GMX perp dex, we envision our L3 as a dedicated blockchain nurturing a similar ecosystem. Third parties and companies will have the freedom to build products and directly interact with our millions of users. This opens a new realm of possibilities for collaboration and innovation.
It's important to note that we will continue with all our current products and maintain our multi-chain deployments. However, the key advantage of our L3 is the seamless integration it offers. The real users we onboard through our ticketing service on any chain will be able to interact effortlessly with products and protocols deployed on our L3. This strategy is integral to our mission of bringing real users to the blockchain, providing them with a wallet, and introducing them to the expansive possibilities of onchain services.
To say that there are opportunities looming in the ticketing space would be a severe understatement.
Leveraging our access to real users
The universal response we get when speaking to anyone in Web3 is that we have somewhat of a unicorn on our hands with our highly unique selling point: Web2 product market fit. Not taking into account our upcoming deals, there is already serious demand for our usecase across the top tier chains. Both existing ones and those in development.
We are in talks of various stages of opening up ways to bring our tickets to a wide variety of L1’s, L2’s & L3’s. The key pillars for these assessments are development feasibility, marketing alignment and support, understanding & experience around the ticketing usecase.
Big opportunity: onchain secondary market
Over the years of experience in dealing with hundreds of promoters, artists, and ticketing professionals, we have identified several ‘silver bullets’ that we see as features with extremely high potential for disruption in the event industry. Scalp-free tickets were the first, our RWA Event financing is another, but we have much more on the radar.
One feature that we are scoping out and seeing increasing value in is the onchain secondary market. Bringing the (re)sale of tickets directly onchain exponentially drives our beloved onboarding of folks into Web3, showing people how easy this flow can be and making them comfortable in a crypto environment.
Aside from the practical benefits of being able to facilitate person A to sell their ticket to person B and immediately receive their funds in stablecoin, this infrastructure also further opens doors to some interesting parties; both in ticketing and crypto.
On the ticketing side we already have significant interest in this feature from entrenched ticketeers, who are waiting for us to deliver this so they can explore and calculate the upside for them to take resale onchain.
On the crypto side, you can imagine the type of added value this would bring to exchanges, who are always looking to boost their ecosystem size. Providing them with an organic way to drive users to their platform is a prospect they have expressed a lot of interest in. Needless to say we are excited about the potential here.
Update: RWA Event Financing
One of the biggest features we have been looking forward to unleashing for a meme-able while now is our RWA Event Financing. While technically ready, we have been blocked by regulatory challenges until this point from properly launching this feature in the way we see it flourishing.
Check out how this feature supports artists’ independence and see how the true pioneer of the usecase, David Bowie, blazed the trail:
As part of the launch of OPEN we have been strategizing on a way to clear the hurdles we’ve been facing, with some welcome support and inspiration from our partners and befriended DeFi protocols. We are now in the final stages of wrapping up these implementations, which will definitively clear the path forward. Aside from interest from event organizers in our network, we will also be chasing collaborative opportunities with DeFi teams of chains we work with, as well as onboarding campaigns with web3-native artists, for example on platforms like Sound.xyz.
On to legally greener pastures
The launch of the Event Financing module is a much-anticipated milestone in our journey. Our path to this point has been filled with careful preparations and navigating the terrain of regulatory considerations, a common facet of the dynamic crypto landscape. A key focus has been clarifying the legal framework for the RWA module, which involves tokenizing a 'real' legal loan.
In response to recent regulatory developments in the EU, we've set in motion the incorporation of a new entity in a jurisdiction renowned for its forward-thinking attitude towards DeFi and RWA-related projects. This strategic decision aligns us with the best practices seen in other successful projects in the DeFi space.
The incorporation process is in full swing and nearing its completion. Upon finalization, the runway will be clear for the Event Financing module to take flight. Get ready for the exhilarating journey ahead!
The interface is already live, so you can have a look and get acquainted with the environment and its workings:
Three important points about OPN, the heart and soul of the operation:
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Every ticket or collectible issued on OPEN’s infrastructure requires OPN to complete its journey. On top of this already kick-ass usecase, with every new feature or product we design, more utility and demand is added to OPN.
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We now have a base layer of volume and liquidity, but this is still the first level and needs to be improved. Bigger listings, more market makers. To level up these metrics an increased trading inventory on the market makers’ side is needed, to meet the requirements of higher volume exchanges. We believe the DAO funds can play a valuable role here, and you can expect a proposal on this topic with more context soon.
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Short term housekeeping: We are expecting to complete the protocol’s tokenomics migration from GET to OPN by the first week of June. This means that every ticket issued will be fueled by OPN, and staking rewards will begin to accrue, ultimately going to holders of xOPN, at the start of the new vesting cycle, on June 10th.
And now, LFG
We hope the above gives you a sense of the scope of our plans and the strategic considerations we have our eyes on. It’s important to state that we rely heavily on input and findings from the OPEN community. Given the ever-changing nature of the industry and the opportunities that pop up at a crazy pace, we appreciate suggestions and discussions in Telegram & Discord.
As we expand our operations and embed further in the crypto space, there will be an increasingly important role for the community to shape the future of OPEN’s onchain ticketing revolution.
Join the conversation on all things OPEN: