The OPEN Ticketing Ecosystem is the home for onchain ticketing.

To proudly proclaim this, requires an onchain ticketing infrastructure that is ultra scalable, serviceable globally and able to handle throughput that can peak in the millions per day for events around the world. That’s why we’ve built state of the art smart contracts and ticket issuance facilities that can handle the demand necessary for global ticketing at the worlds largest event locations.

Integrators can tap into our issuance tooling through an API which provides access to each tool in the OPEN suite. Organisers, artists and general audiences can make use of OPEN tooling, either through existing ticketing integrators using OPEN, such as GUTS Tickets or Your Ticket Provider, or tap into open community tooling being built.

Under the Hood

Every new event registered through our infrastructure creates a unique smart contract from which onchain tickets are issued for a single event. This makes it incredibly easy to identify tickets distributed for a single event through OPEN, both as the ticket issuer and as a spectator viewing ticketing activity through our explorer and other community tools.

By issuing onchain tickets for an event through a unique smart contract, metadata can be set uniquely on a per event or per ticket basis. What’s more, each onchain ticket can be used as an access tool into Web3 experiences through token gated authentication such as Wallet Connect.

The utility on offer here is limitless, from access into exclusive merchandise, artist communities, digital or metaverse experiences and future ticket sales. It now becomes possible for an organiser or artist to not only track ownership of a ticket from their event, but a range of events each with their own smart contract address.

This also allows for both unique collections and enforceable royalties to be set on the contract level, ensuring maximum composability across external dApps, such as OpenSea, Blur and so forth.

Issuing at Scale

With over seven years of blockchain expertise and innate knowledge of the throughput required for global ticketing, we’ve built and iterated on our smart contracts to drastically cut down on gas usage and ensure batches of tickets can be processed at any given time.

This has resulted in our ability to batch 250 onchain tickets into a single transaction.

Batching ticket interactions in this way helps from all angles: our API has to confirm fewer transactions for the same number of tickets, and only needs to update the certain parts of the on-chain data per-batch rather than everything per-ticket. Calculating the GET fuel usage here is the perfect example of this as it requires writing the same two pieces of data to the chain; the reserved fuel needs to increase and the integrator’s available balance needs to decrease. When batching we no longer need to update these per-ticket and can be updated once per-batch. This same approach is taken for updating the NFT token balances and ownership data resulting in heavy savings when these costs are spread across the batch. Where two storage slot updates would previously cost a full 40,000 gas per-ticket, doing that same operation once for a batch of 250 socialises the cost to a featherweight 160 gas per-ticket.

When you bring it all together you end up with something quite powerful, which was confirmed on the initial production environment benchmark tests that resulted in 57,500 NFTs minted in 13 minutes and 6 seconds. What would have taken almost three days in our initial contracts can now be handled in less time than a coffee break. The API and back-end services have been found to be highly performant at confirming transactions on Polygon mainnet and the stress-test proves it, showing a peak 316x efficiency improvement in throughput.

As for cost of minting NFTs, where a single Ticket under V1 would previously cost 365,000 gas, this has been compressed all the way down to 30,950 for batches of 250, an 91.5% cost reduction.

Having built the highest throughput dedicated onchain ticket issuance facilities, has enabled us to issue over 5 million onchain tickets to date for some of the world’s most iconic locations. Take for example the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, where integrator GUTS Tickets routinely handles 16,000+ attendees per event.

That’s frictionless onchain accessibility. That’s OPEN.