It’s been 195 days since we revealed OPEN, the home for onchain ticketing and an ecosystem designed to change the events industry for the better. Since that launch moment a lot has happened internally, from the build out of new products, the addition of new integrators and a renewed team structure. Whilst plenty has gone on behind the scenes, we’re eager to finally share this with you, the community and reveal the exciting road ahead.

We realize the last few months have been far quieter than we would have hoped and thank the community for patience whilst developments have been bubbling away behind closed doors. The good news is that the time for silence is over and as Q4 gets underway you can expect a lot more updates from us.

With that said, in this blog we will lay out the road ahead for OPEN and provide an update on the vision and movement we plan to build upon based on progress we’ve made internally which we’re eager to share as we head into the last quarter of 2024.

To kick things off, let’s dive into what we’re calling the OPEN movement, a renewed approach to positioning the OPEN ecosystem and OPN.

Kickstarting A Movement

OPEN has always prided itself in being one of the most ‘down to earth’ ecosystems across the entire onchain space, achieving real world adoption and having the transparent stats to back it up. Perhaps ahead of our time, the role of OPN has always been a simple premise, the more tickets onchain, the more OPN is used.

We’ll never stop delivering on that goal and pride ourselves in having that fundamental linkage between ecosystem adoption and token usage but with that being said - much like the scene from Silicon Valley, in which the old adage of being ‘pre-revenue’ rather than ‘post-revenue’ rings true. It’s safe to say that the majority of ecosystems in this space understand the importance of really selling the dream and not focusing on the here and now and we believe OPEN should be doing the same.

Whilst we focus a lot on what’s happening within the OPEN ecosystem right now, we’ve perhaps fallen short of getting both the onchain space and the events industry truly understanding the long term potential of OPEN and the power in joining the ecosystem to be a part of the story.

We’ve seen the rise of a lot of ‘culture tokens’ that represent an idea or belief that amass huge communities because of their belonging to that ecosystem, yet fundamentally drop off because of no tangible product or real world usecase underlying the ecosystem.

We believe going forward we need to strive more toward the culture and movement of changing the global events industry, with less reliance on the here and now of current business. That’s why we’ve made the decision that going forward we’re changing our stance towards how we portray OPEN, from now on we’ll be kicking off the OPEN movement, a bold, rebellious and aligned stance around selling the full picture of what OPEN can become and not being afraid to call out problems in the current industry.

This movement is based on a single dream ‘to recreate the events industry from the ground up, on new rails, for all to benefit, unlocking billions of revenue onchain in the process’

It’s not about counting the tickets per week, or the OPN used to fuel tickets. It’s about how OPEN’s ecosystem best stands to disrupt the multi-billion industry that behemoths like Ticketmaster gobble up. For OPEN to win right now, we need as many people along this journey with us, how many people believe in a new events industry on new rails, whether thats community members, artists, organizers, wannabe ticketeers and legacy players. Because if we achieve that belief system, then the world is OPEN (and OPN’s) oyster.

Fundamentals will always be important, but with ticketing, fundamentals are a slow multi-year process, we’ve all seen this, what’s important is that OPEN is on the right trajectory when it comes to growth. We’ve built mature products, extensive API capabilities, we know the ticketing industry innately and we realize which onchain products have product market fit and how we can bring them to market - what we need now is an incredibly strong network and community which we can build together with this movement.

Whilst bringing more tickets onchain will always be our priority, focusing on how many tickets are already in the ecosystem, fails to capture the sheer size and magnitude of the opportunity in front of us should we really crack the code of disrupting the monopolies of the world aka Ticketmaster.

We as a community and team, together have the chance to sell the honest dream, the feasible and achievable dream of an alternative events industry, one powered by onchain rails, by the OPEN ecosystem, but importantly one that’s free of monopolistic shackles.

The guidelines we will focus on when it comes to communication and content:

• Less focus on the day to day and week to week ticketing activity

• Less focus on the price of OPN being driven by ticket sales

• Less focus on where OPEN is in the here and now

• More focus on where OPEN is heading, the long term vision

• More focus on scoping the opportunity and size of the industry if we bring it onchain

• More focus on ‘tokenizing the hatred for ticketing monopolies’

• More focus on the story of artists, organizers, their struggles and their accomplishments

• More direct content pointing out current ticketing problems as they arise

• More grassroots and for the people, more culture than ever.

With these points in mind, we have a lot of ideas for how we can increase exposure and onboarding of new participants into the movement, central to these ideas will be a new and improved token hub that will become the outer funnel for any onboarding into OPEN, whether as a community member, new integrator, independent artist and so forth.

This hub will be central to OPEN’s vision, it will show the opportunity at scale if we crack the industry wide open, the tools available in the ecosystem, how anyone can get involved and provide a deeper understanding of how OPEN plans to disrupt monopolies through Vertical Integration.

Vertical Integration you say?

Along Came Vertical Integration

We’ve come a very long way since our humble beginnings of building ticketing issuances onchain, particularly in the last two years with the addition of onchain wallets and soon onchain payments, this leads to the next step in our plan which is Vertical Integration.

The most successful monopolies of the world, including Ticketmaster are kings at the Vertical Integration game, in fact it’s the very reason why Ticketmaster is able to claim such a strong moat in the industry, they’re not just ticketeers, they own the entire event vertical.

By being venue owners, ticketeers, promoters and everything in between, these monopolies create a lock in effect which cements their moat even further.

Our plan is to beat Ticketmaster at their own game, through a vertical integration model built on onchain rails. This takes the power of the moat and puts it out into the open, transparently for all to see, use and benefit from.

We’ve of course built ticket issuance systems that can rival the best of the best globally and have been working diligently towards offering deep event financing potential onchain, but the ambitions go beyond just these two primitives. To truly conquer the market, OPEN must be deeper ingrained in the full event vertical, this includes venue ownership, onchain promotion, onchain sales and resale rules, fan affiliate systems, plug and play primary and secondary marketplaces and the collection and strengthening of the fan relationship, through data, community and content. This in turn creates a better world for artists (more control, own their data, etc) and fans too.

The Vertical Integration Stack In A Nutshell:

• Ticket Issuance

• Event Financing

• Venue Ownership

• Onchain Promotion & Affiliate System

• Plug & Play Sales Platforms

• Post-Event Community Building & Fan Data

Onchain Primitives:

• Onchain Wallets

• Onchain Assets

• Onchain Sales Rules

• Onchain Revenue Flows

• Onchain Verification

The Road Ahead

With the Vertical Integration model in mind, lets take a look at what to expect in the months to come:

Azerion Rollout

In October we’ll fully announce and go live with Azerion with an expected 3-4 games per week in October, expanding to the full roster of teams by the end of the year, this should, as mentioned in the earlier DAO proposal result in approximately 1.8 million tickets onchain and importantly expand the horizon of bringing new users into not only the OPEN ecosystem but partner platforms through behind the scenes wallet connect functionality.

Every week we’ll highlight games and showcase the ticket linked collectibles issued through OPEN, providing plenty of content for the community to sink their teeth into to spread the news of the integration.

We’re then looking to expand the ways in which ticket linked collectibles through Azerion can be used and we’re currently in the process of talking to a number of onchain protocols who may wish to onboard football attendees into their Dapps via incentivized onboarding that could pay out too Azerion, the club and OPEN.

Chain Announcement

In October we’ll also be announcing a new chain partner that OPEN will be integrating into that shares in our ethos of consumer crypto and the accessibility inroads within the events industry. They’ll be an instrumental partner in helping us spread the word of onchain ticketing along with bringing new participants into the OPEN movement.

Their team is exceptional, having a very rich history in past ecosystems and we fully expect OPEN to share the limelight that they will no doubt have in the coming months. What’s more they take a quality over quantity mindset, resulting in OPEN being one of a very few select projects launching on the chain.

Quality > Quantity.

Event Financing

Q4 is also the time for event financing to shine, with a few pilot plans in the works plus some expanded ideas that tie into the venue ownership concept, could event financing be used to crowdfund a shared quest that would be a first for the entire onchain ecosystem? Yes it could. We’ve got a number of ideas on how we can tie Event Financing into the Vertical Integration model, using financing as a lever towards achieving that vertical moat.

One such case is the ability to crowdfund the ownership of popular venues throughout Europe, in which a pool of contributors would ‘own’ or have a stake in a venue, in return OPEN’s ticketing would be enforced and used at the venue, along with onchain payments and many more expanded concepts - (payment wrist bands in OPN tokens anyone).

This would provide ultimate freedom in expanding onchain tooling into the entire event vertical through the ownership of a venue, we’re very excited to reveal more in this front as we head into Q4.

Onchain Secondary Market

As you may have heard on several spaces or podcasts over the last few months, an area of great opportunity for us is being able to facilitate secondary markets for large ticketeers who don't have the capacity to build their own in-house solution.

With regulation in Europe also heating up around allowing for the ability to resell tickets outside of closed ecosystems, the timing is perfect for us to seize the opportunity and as such we’re already far underway with the build out of an onchain secondary marketplace that will via the API, allow tickets to be replicated onchain and then sold on our marketplace with payments done fully onchain, allowing for resale revenue to flow directly to the integrator and the OPEN ecosystem.

With many large ticketeers reselling on average 4-7% of their tickets per year, we anticipate a steady traction of volume as we roll this out to new ticketeers. We already have one ticketeer ready to adopt this solution once development completes.

As hinted above, this new ticketeer will be bringing their entire ticketing volumes onchain through OPEN, providing a significant boost (or multiple) to the current amount of tickets issued to date. We anticipate the reveal to occur by the end of the year, with a bunch of content lined up to share the unique events and event locations they facilitate and how we’re helping them bring their event ticketing onchain.

Telegram Self Service Ticketing

Last but certainly not least is an idea that we’ve had floating around for a while, which we’ve now assigned more urgency towards building that will help OPEN conquer the self serve events industry, particularly with crypto conferences and side events. After the rise of Telegram ‘Mini Apps’ which allow for native applications to be loaded and distributed directly in Telegram, we foresee a huge opportunity to attempt to displace Luma through onchain ticketing directly within Telegram that can be picked up and used by either conferences or the self serve events around them.

We’ve identified a number of ways we can make this app really solve some core problems for free event tickets, such as incentivizing attendance, providing a clearer picture of which attendees will turn up plus gamifying the experience through shared lotteries across events.

Expect to here more on this during November and December.

Chapter 6: Community Service

On the community front, we’ve heard you loud and clear about the relative silence over these past months and we recognize the need for clearer and more frequent communication. Luckily with the movement approach, we can give the community a lot more power and agency to raise their voices and in the process convert more people to becoming OPEN community members. Given that integrator news and development moves relatively slowly, we can bridge the gap through movement content far more frequently than checking in on fundamental updates, that’s not to say we won’t be providing the community with updates when products progress - but that these will come when the time is right.

Here’s what we propose:

Weekly Check Ins

A weekly check-in every Monday, that will provide an update on community growth, token holder growth, engagement metrics on socials, any product updates that will be interspersed when ready and any other information the community should be aware of.

Trending News Raids

Trending news ‘raids’. For the longest time, we’ve refrained from using the OPEN account or team accounts for jumping on the ‘live grenades’ of hot news, whether it’s failed ticket sales, monopoly articles or anything in between. That stance ends today, we’ll be far more direct, far more edgy and ready at a moment’s notice to pounce on the clear injustices in the current events industry. We want to arm the community to tackle these too. We’ll provide content, guidance and be there too to jump on new topics when they arise.

Maarten’s Monthly Insights

The loss of the monthly blog was certainly felt. Whilst we believe the monthly blog wasn’t sustainable both in having to deliver half baked updates on products that take longer to come to fruition than a month, they were still a great way to keep the community in the loop and excited about what we’re all up to.

That’s why we’re bringing back a new form of monthly blog, in the shape of Maarten’s Monthly Insights, it’ll be raw, it’ll be insightful and it’ll point out pressing matters in the wider industry and we certainly think you’ll enjoy it.

Community Manager & DAO Manager Weekly Meeting

As of last week we’ve began a weekly meeting with Nate our community manager and Kyzou the DAO manager to discuss any pressing questions or matters the community has. The goal of these weekly meetings is to shorten the length of distance between week to week community conversations and us internally. Via a spreadsheet, we’ll handle and track and look to resolve any matters raised by the community.

Movement / Token Hub - Statistic Insights

How many people are viewing the hub, and converting into either community members, business prospects, token holders and more? This is all the information we plan to collect in the hub and provide it to the community so everyone can feel tangible progress in spreading the word.

Can you feel the movement bubbling already? You may not yet, but you will soon. There’s a lot in store, a lot more for the community to interact with and Q4 will be the moment of activation for this movement.

We hope this update provided some clarity and excitement towards where we’re heading and you can look forward to the beginnings of the OPEN movement very soon.

Until next time!