 There we go. Welcome all. This is Brett Russell with the co-chair of the Hyperledger Media and Entertainment Special Interest Group. And today we have Matt Zaracina, CEO and co-founder of True Tickets, which is a company that is revolutionizing the ticket industry and using in some cases blockchain applications, the IBM blockchain. I did have a look at or listen to the interview with you Matt and Jerry Cuomo. And that was really good. It was really, you know, I don't know, Jerry. I've been to a few events and I think I've met him, but we're not the best of buddies. But he's a good podcaster guy. I thought, you know, he's a brilliant technician, but he was a good podcaster. And I'll actually put the link up in the, I'll put the link up for anyone. Then that will be in the recording here. So, sir, I just want to... Yeah, I think I've known Jerry now for, gosh, almost five years. So I think- No kidding. He's known about us since we started. I mean, we incorporated it as a company in September of 2017. I think we started engaging with him and the Hyperledger folks and the IBM folks. I want to say kind of fall, winter of 2017. And then probably more so kind of spring, winter spring of 2018. Well, I'm sure that he was who played some role in helping you guys get pulled together the IBM side of the blockchain thing. And that's a phenomenal asset in him. So tell us a little bit about you, about your team, about TrueTickets, where you're going, and you have the floor. Go ahead, Matt. Thank you. I'll share my screen because it's always easier to rely on a couple of slides, right? So let me know if you can see it. You should be all right. Yeah. Cool. So TrueTickets, what we really are, is it says there, right? We're a provider of trusted access for live experiences. And what that means in maybe a more technical sense is we're a B2B enterprise SaaS infrastructure solution for ticketing. We're built to work with any ticketing system. We're built to work with any marketplace. And it's the best analogy for what we are trying to do and why it's unique is if anybody's familiar with airline ticketing, there's a company called Saber, and Saber is the underlying infrastructure that essentially facilitates the vast majority of airline ticketing, especially in the year in the US. And something like that doesn't exist in live event ticketing, right? Which is by not having this underlying infrastructure that creates transparency and efficiency, you get all sorts of issues. And that's essentially what we do and that's essentially what we're trying to be and trying to solve for. So today I'll talk a little bit about our team. I'll talk about ticketing. I'll talk a little bit about blockchain and white fabric, but most of what I'll talk about is just on our business and the problem of solving, right? So here's our team. So True Tickets was co-founded by myself, Steve, by me and my co-founder, Steve. Steve and I have known each other for about 20 years. We were both Navy pilots together. We met in flight school. We reconnected in January of 2017. I had just taken a corporate innovation job for Fred Jarvis, the Fed's company called TALIS where I was their director of innovation. I led their blockchain project. I led their autonomous vehicle project. Did a couple of other things. Steve was actually at the Pentagon working on blockchain at the Pentagon and we connected. We had tried to do some things kind of in the aerospace and defense space, but he, it's a kind of spring, summer of 2017, had written a white paper on ticketing and it reminded me of a conversation I had with an expert at MIT who's an advisor to our company. We had had a conversation in January at MIT on just blockchain and potential use cases. For a minute, we kind of talked about ticketing and we thought that was a great use case. My CTO Andrew, he and I actually worked together at TALIS and what makes Andrew unique is he has experience in building and delivering distributed systems and then Ken. So my head of sales, Ken has over 30 years in ticketing. What makes Ken very unique though is there's really only been one other blockchain-enabled ticketing company for all intents and purposes that's had a lot of activity or I'd say, you could say it's the only one that's been acquired and that was upgraded. They're an Ethereum-based firm. There were four individuals, Ken was the fourth. The three more technical individuals went to Ticketmaster. Ken didn't want to go back to Ticketmaster. I had an opportunity to join a couple of different other startups in the fall of 2018. I was introduced to him by one of our investors and he decided to join us. So when you look across the board, I'd like to say from just a business, a technology and an industry standpoint, we all have some level of experience with blockchain and ticketing and really trying to solve real-world problems. A little bit about me. My journey has been an interesting one. I started out as a Navy pilot and then I taught at Cornell for a bit. Then I went to Deloitte where I worked in their M&A practice and then went to TALIS where I worked in corporate innovation and really my focus in corporate innovation was on finding my next opportunity. So if you would have told me when I started that job at TALIS, I'd be running a digital ticketing startup, leveraging blockchain and hyperledger fabric. I probably wouldn't have believed you, but here I am almost five years later after leaving the job and this is what we're doing. And if you're interested in my perspectives on ticketing, emerging tech and ticketing, whether it's NFTs, whether it's Web3, know that I have opinions. Again, a lot of them are on mediums if you want to check them out on medium. So the ones I've listed here are more of the, some of the popular ones or I'd say most red. So just what maybe the future of the industry would look like. My perspective is I'm not as big on NFTs as tickets as maybe other people, namely because when you think of an NFT, it's a digital asset and a ticket is actually not an asset. It's a revocable license. And that's one of those foundational, definitional differences that is actually pretty important. I'll talk a little bit about ticketing and Web3.0 and what that could mean. So if you're interested in any of those opinions, feel free to check those out. That's about my team, that's about me. So let's talk ticketing. When you think about ticketing and the problems that need to be solved, it's always important to really understand the history. And maybe we think about ticketing today as like a fairly static industry, but it's actually quite dynamic. And the world of ticketing is always struggled with this idea of control and transparency with distribution, right? They want to get as many eyes or as many hands-on tickets as possible to drive attendance. Control and transparency can mitigate that, right? So we go back to the 1970s, the evolution there was just moving away from regional box offices. Again, tickets used to be sold at the box office was the place to get the ticket. Tickets were in ticket racks and that's how people got tickets. And then in the 80s, you started to see computerized ticketing. And in many ways, like this was actually led by IBM, oddly enough, you know, big mainframes, they were doing ticketing. You start to see ticket master is actually founded around this time. And then in the 90s, there's the evolution to the web, right? And Ken likes to say, he was that ticket master when they sold their first ticket on the web, right? And they were high-fiving and they thought, wow, this would be great if, you know, maybe one or two or 3% of our sales come through this new web channel. And obviously, they underestimated that a little bit. As you move into the 2000s, you start to see is, you know, with the rise of the web and marketplaces, obviously marketplaces and fan clubs, so new ways to distribute tickets, new ways to get reach, new ways to monetize, new revenue streams. This is where you see, you know, the stuff helps of the world to an extent like Seakee can do the seats really, really start to emphasize, you know, and grow in the market. And in the 2010s, in the teens, it's really about mobile ticketing, right? So getting tickets on your phones. And as we look forward to the future, you know, what are the 20s, 30s and 40s look like? It's really this idea of, you know, does a distributed ledger technology or distributed system really start to add value to ticketing, right? Now, so now you've got kind of ticketing, moving full digital, and there's obviously still issues with ticketing, right? And when you think about the problem you're solving, it really helps to understand the life cycle, right? So I know this is a little bit hard to see with the arrows, but all tickets start with the ticket issuer, right? So you've got this issuer, this live event venue that could be theater, sports, music, what have you. And their job is to disseminate the tickets, right? So that these tickets can access their IP, which is the content they create. And what makes ticketing challenging, right? Is those tickets actually can go through multiple channels to ultimately end up at the ticket buyer. So one, the live event venue can be selling directly to the ticket buyer. Think about, you know, when I grew up in Minneapolis, I went to First Ave and I would buy tickets directly from First Ave and I would go. So that's the case of the ticket buyer directly from the venue. Then there's these authorized sellers. So some venues will leverage marketplaces or other distribution channels in an authorized way to sell tickets, right? So maybe they have a deal with a channel and that channel then, you know, for example, like a gold star in the theater space could sell tickets on behalf of a venue, right? So this is an authorized seller. And then there's these resellers, right? Which could be brokers, scalpers, anyone who's flipping a ticket, you know, that's kind of that third one here. And there's now creates this matrix, right? Of, you know, tickets getting to the ticket buyer, maybe it goes from the venue to the authorized seller to the actual kind of buyer or attendee. And then it goes or it goes authorized seller or broker to eventual kind of ticket buyer attendee. And this then kind of creates that problem, right? Because with every one of these transactions, and if you have a opacity in the system or a lack of efficiency, lack of transparency, you create issues, right? Those are where you get fees and those are where you get people buying illegitimate or fraudulent tickets. So those all create issues, right? So understanding the complexity and the complications of the life cycle and understanding this flow is critical in how you think about solving this problem. And if we take a step back and just think about in general, you know, when you're trying to apply distributed ledger tech to a solution, understanding the business problem and why having a distributed data solution is potentially better than the other solutions out there is key. And like I said, you know, we focus a lot less on the tech and we focus more on the problem or solving. So when it pertains to ticketing, what are the problems? Well, I mean, one is control, right? So the minute kind of that ticket issue or sells that ticket and it leaves their hands, you know, they've lost the ability to have control over, right? It means if it can be duplicated, it can be stopped, can be manipulated. The other one is identity. And I think this is kind of a shocking stat, right? The Boston Red Sox or this by no means is pertains to like our clients, which are our clients, but you know, I talked to, this wasn't the Red Sox, I talked to another majorly baseball team. They know 25% of the people who attend their stadium in the year. They draw too many people a year. That's 15, you know, 1.5 million people they don't know, right? And that identity is a huge issue. And when we think about, you know, the attention economy, right? Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and Google and Facebook, they know 90 to 99% of the consumers of their service. And if you're a live event venue, you only know 25 to 40% of people consuming your service. You're at a disadvantage because you can't market, you can't curate your content or you can't really curate it as well or market it as well as those other organizations in the attention economy. Last one's integrity, right? So everyone, we've all been there. You know, we're looking, we want to go to an event, it's a high profile event, we're buying a ticket, we're spending a lot of money and we're just kind of uneasy or we're queasy or nauseous that, oh man, maybe this ticket won't work, right? So you're always kind of concerned about it. So these are the key problems in ticketing. And when you think about how you solve it, I mean, it's obviously, you know, you want to make sure there's control, right? So making sure those tickets can't be duplicated or manipulated. You want to make sure there's identity, right? Event organizers should know who's coming to their actual shows. And the third is verifiability, right? So you want integrity of tickets. And this is really how we approach solving ticketing. Why blockchain? The why blockchain piece in ticketing is pretty simple. You can Google blockchain and ticketing and I don't even know if true tickets will pop up as one of the top searches. And look, that's good, right? Like people are excited about this technology and what it can do. At the highest highest level, when you kind of go back to that square, right? Where you've got the live event venue, the primary sale by a third party, the resale, the ticket buyer, ticketing is a distributed problem. In that you have multiple external organizations or entities or people, essentially handling the same inventory. So the thought that people like us and people like me and companies like us envision exploring is, well, if it's a distributed problem, distributed problems are best solved by distributed solutions. An analogy to use is, I used to fly the S860 Bravo, right? So it was a Black Hawk, but it was retrofitted to hunt submarines. But anybody who knows, if you're in kind of the warfare community, the best way to hunt something is to be in the medium, right? So we were always at a disadvantage. The best way to hunt an enemy submarine is with another submarine, someone that's in the medium, right? Same thing with aircraft, like the best way to fight an aircraft is usually with another aircraft. And so in this instance, when you think about it, like a distributed technology should theoretically be able to solve a distributed problem. That's why people get excited about blockchain, right? And we all know what the issues are. We talked about, you know, attendance, we talked about knowledge. The other thing too is really interesting is understanding that tickets again are not assets, they're revocable licenses. And so when you were, if you had a card stock ticket back in the day, it was, you know, there was all this verbiage and fine print on the back and you never really read it. Well, those are the terms and conditions to fulfill that license, right? So it's not an asset. It's not a thing like you, that you own like a house or a car. And so there can be different licensing restrictions and teams and leagues and venues want to enforce those restrictions. And for the most part, it was really challenging to enforce them. But now as it is ticketing moves digital, it becomes much, much easier to enforce some of those restrictions. And you can automate that and it makes it a lot easier. The other thing too is when you think about it from a business standpoint, there's a ton of money kind of left on the table via red sticky behavior. Right? So when you think of value of partnerships, if I'm a ticket issuer, if I'm majorly baseball, if I'm the NFL and I had majorly baseball, it does 70 million tickets a year. If I want to strike a deal with a marketplace and make them my exclusive marketplace to have maximum value acting, I need to make sure I can ensure those minimum leakage. Right? And so today there's a lot of leakage. So the value of their partnerships goes down. If I can have a technology that allows me to control the channels, my tickets are access to DIA, as well as who my channel partners are and the controls around them, I actually increase the value of those partnerships. Right? So it means that I can drive more revenue to my organization because there's less leakage. And so that again, that's why this whole kind of chain of custody, right? You bring identity, you bring accountability to ticketing. And you go from a situation where the live event venue is not the data owner, right? To one where they are or at least they're, they have visibility into all the data real time. And that's a game changer. Right? So that changes everything. And I was actually having a conversation with an MBA team owner yesterday. And we were talking about the relationship they have with their major ticketing system, which everybody knows. But for them, the value proposition or the equation they're trying to balance is my, you know, I trade my data, they give me cash up front. Right? Well, the only way to really change that because they can't really impact the cash because, you know, if I'm said basketball team and your ticketing system is writing me a $2 million check to kind of get my tickets and get my data, obviously the ticketing system believes that the value of those tickets and the data is worth more than $2 million. And so if you can do things as a team, as a league, as a ticket issuer to drive up the value either of that inventory or that data, right? So when you have blockchain you get not only more data but you get more consistent, more standard, more accurate data. That actually means the value of that data goes up which means if you want to make a cash trade, you can drive up more value, right? So it's all about creating value for the issuer of the ticket. So why fabric, right? I mean, there's a ton of people doing tokens and ticketing and ICOs and all that kind of stuff. Our learning is that really that ticketing is a B2B enterprise business challenge, right? And why to an extent you probably haven't seen as many ticketing systems proliferate or proliferate more broadly in the space is because some of these unique technical requirements that are really minimums for ticketing. And the first one is transaction processing speed. There's really not a world where you can effectively implement a distributed ledger or blockchain ticketing solution at scale that can't process more than 1500 transactions per second or at least a minimum, right? And that has to do with on sales and most of the websites for the vast majority of websites and ticketing allow for up to 1500 transactions per second. And that's for that peak volume, right? That's a, you know, playoff team goes on sale. Taylor Swift tickets gone sale, there's a spike and you need to be able to handle that traffic. If you can't meet that minimum, it's pretty challenging to sell yourself as a solution to anyone in the marketplace. The second one is latency. And one of the things again, sorry, and on transactions per second, you can architect fabric in a way to give you several thousand transactions per second. And again, it's because it's enterprise to enterprise, right? You probably only have a handful of nodes or participants in your broader system. You're not dealing with thousands upon thousands of nodes and systems, right? I mean, if you think about the US, there's such a five major, major ticketing systems, right? There's Ticketmaster, there's Tickets.com, Seake, Access, and then Tessitura, you know, that's in sports, right? Or sorry, Tessitura is not in sports, but there's only a kind of a half dozen or so ticketing systems. And then when you think marketplaces, again, it's about a half dozen. You've got StubHub, Seake, TKM Plus, Vivid Seats, TickPick, GameTime. There's not thousands, right? And even though ticketing feels like a peer-to-peer transaction, it's really not. You need that marketplace to list that ticket. And without that marketplace, it makes it really hard to find buyers, right? So there's always this kind of push and pull between is it really peer-to-peer as a B2B? We see it as B2B. And so Fabric does really well as handle the transaction problem. Second one is latency. How quickly you kind of flow through those transactions. And in ticketing, again, this needs to be near milliseconds. And if you're latency, some of the faster ones on the more tokenized platforms are five seconds. I think Algorand is getting to two and a half seconds. That's still not fast enough in that. Think about if you've got, we've got a client, Boston Symphony, they do outdoor concerts at Tanglewood. They're doing 15,000, 20,000 people. They've got four gates. I mean, even at two and a half seconds per kind of transaction being processed, it's just not fast enough. So you need to be able to go fast. And that's one of the things that Fabric allows for it is very well. And the third one is finality. Anything where you're waiting, where there's a confirmation or a wait time, again, that is any measurable length of time is a challenge in ticketing. Not that you would use a proof of work solution, but like Bitcoin, right? It's proof of work, finality, confirmation is an hour. What happens if after an hour or someone scans a ticket, and then you find out that that transaction was invalid, they shouldn't have been in there. You go pull them out of the seat. And so in thinking through and understanding your business use case, really starts to drive your protocol constraints. There's actually not many protocols that can handle the technical requirements of ticketing. And the last one is interesting to ticketing too. If you look at Fabric, what it does really well is it's optimal for handling generalized data and data objects. That's important because when you look at the vast majority of systems and marketplaces out there, a ticket is a data object. And essentially generalized data. It's not a token. And if you're going to be something that plugs into other systems to make them more efficient, you really need to be able to align with their data architecture, data model, and data mapping. And if you're going to tokenize, it just makes things harder. Now, if you are a believer that there are new marketplaces, new systems that are going to completely replace the existing systems and infrastructure, then you may think differently than I do on this one. That said, what people, I think, like me, when I initially got in this field, the comprehend is actually how much these other ticketing systems do, right? Whether it's payment rails, whether it's seat mapping, seat configuration, management of constituents. I mean, these systems are so big that and do so much, it's really hard to argue that anyone would make this massive change. And you have to couple that with two in ticketing while ticketing may seem benign. Ticketing is a mission critical system for every live experience creator, right? Whether it's the Celtics or the Patriots or the Symphony, if ticketing doesn't work on one night, it's a disaster. And so they need to go with proven technology, they need to go with things that work. And so this is one of the reasons why this ticketing, while people get excited about distributed ledger type of ticketing, why maybe it's been a little bit slower to permeate is because these systems are complex, they do a lot. And it is a big effort to shift for any one of these venues. And the other thing too is if they're shifting, I mean, again, the technology just has to be as rock solid as possible. And this is why you see a little bit more probably conservatism in the approach or in digital transformation that you see from live event venues. Now that said, one thing that one benefit of COVID was you saw a lot more digital transformation and openness to doing things digitally. With that said, they still need to make sure that the ticketing works well. And one of the benefits for True Ticket says that we built a pretty robust solution that our clients feel comfortable using and have been using at its scale. So our solution, our approach again, software is a solution to a problem. We're not trying to fit a technology. We're trying to be very smart about how we solve problems for our customers. The problems in ticketing, we talked about them a little bit. Tickets as duplicable assets. So you've got kind of one paper ticket. You can make a hundred copies and then that's a race condition. Ticketing systems do lag behind other industries and they lag behind because again, they're these big, large, complex solutions. Some of them having code that goes back decades, right to the 70s. Even the newest code bases go back 90s, early 2000s. And so you're talking at best, you most of them are probably 20 year old code bases. So they're suboptimal, but they work, right? And they've been built on top of, so it makes it very challenging for them to evolve. They're kind of more battleships, right? They're not as nimble, even though if you download an app, it may look and feel digital because it is. But don't assume that the technology under it is cloud-native, most efficient and the most optimal for the solution. And then again, we talked about it. Ticketing is a distributive problem, right? So you've got multiple entities essentially handling the same data. And as we think about the ticket life cycle, what we think we can do is listed on the right, right? So as we can provide the event, the live event venue, information regarding who the attendee is or at least one degree of separation, we can provide them controls, we can provide them potential remuneration opportunities. And obviously the direct connection, right? When you're the live event venue, you wanna have that direct relationship, that direct connection with the people who are consuming your service. Those are the people who for whatever reason, maybe you didn't know them right away, but then they're coming in your door. Well, you wanna make sure you connect with them throughout because that's how you can minimize any sort of arbitrage or revenue loss throughout the life cycle. And there's two ways to think about it. So we had a major announcement yesterday. So we announced the release of rules-based ticket sharing. Brett, you talked about it. I did a podcast with Jared Cuomo last week. I actually did one with Dave Wakeman, who's a ticketing consultant, ticketing expert and I was released yesterday. So we talk a little bit more about it, but it's this idea to start the initial rules that our venue clients can implement around tickets. Does the original purchaser of the ticket have to go? So let's say Brett buys four tickets. If those tickets can be shared, but the original purchase has to go, he can only share three of the four. The two other rules are one, can a ticket be shared? So Brett buys four tickets, can those tickets be shared or not? And the third is can they be reshared? So if Brett shares a ticket with me, it either sits with me and can't go anywhere other than back to Brett, or if it can be reshared, I could share with Encore and then it could go on and on and on. And that's what we announced yesterday. It's, we're pretty pleased with it. And the reason we're pleased with it is not because that is the end-all be-all. It's really about what it portends for the future. Which is this idea of controllable resale. So if I can implement and enforce rules around the sharing of the ticket, I could theoretically do the same for resale. So what channels are those tickets going on? So if I'm Boston Symphony, do I want to allow Seakeak to set, allow my tickets to be listed on Seakeak or not? Or TM+, maybe, maybe not. Do I want to strike a deal there? What are the rules around the resale of those tickets? So it's really changing ownership. So Brett's reselling tickets, what are the rules around the transfer of that ownership? So if I buy that ticket, what needs to happen? This could be price floors, price ceilings. This could be all sorts of other issues. And then the third is kind of the remuneration scheme. So if it's sold above face value, just half of that markup go back to the symphony as a donation. So the world of possibilities, when you think about rules-based resale or creating rules-based marketplace infrastructure is really appealing because if I'm Boston Symphony, there's no way I can compete with the search engine optimization of a vivid seats or a Seakeak or a TM+, but what I'd like to do is be able to have a technology that lets me take advantage of their reach without sacrificing control. So that's really what we're exploring now. This is our operational snapshot. I got an update that we're actually live with 10 venues now. So we'll be announcing a new one next week. We've delivered almost 2 million tickets. I'd say about a third of those are enabled by Hyperledger Fabric on blockchain. And so we offer both a blockchain and a non-blockchain service. Some of our clients have no desire to take advantage of secondary markets or other distribution channels. And in that case, that's a completely centralized solution. There's no reason to distribute the data. So we built out a non-blockchain solution that is more cost effective. The market value of our tickets over the last kind of two years has been about $120 million. And of those two million tickets we scanned about one and a quarter. So I'd like to say that we're a pretty proven, pretty proven opportunity and we're hoping to kind of keep this going and build out the marketplace infrastructure. And so with that, there's kind of a little bit of a rambling talk but I'll stop there. I think we got like 25 minutes for having to entertain any questions you all have. That was pretty awesome, Matt. I have a couple of questions. I'll throw it out to the floor, but I like this rules basin. I do recall you talking to Jerry about that, but that's exciting stuff. And I'm reminded of my wife purchasing the latest Bruce Springsteen event. And it was a- Oh, that was a disaster. Talk about clunky. I mean, this is one of the things that they're solving with this new venue or this new method of ticket purchasing through Ticketmaster. And I don't know how they did it, but my wife was in a tizzy for some time looking at waiting to get online and being told she was in a queue and waiting and like it was crazy. What are your thoughts on that? And of course, Bruce, he's in the news about how much these tickets are being sold for. Most of it is to stop the box and some of it is to stop the piracy and are you solving most of that with this new rules-based side of things? So we do it in a different way, right? So unlike Ticketmaster and unlike most people in the ticketing space, we don't sell tickets. We deliver tickets. And as a transparency identity and accountability solution, it's really independent on what happens on the front end, right? So there was an announcement a couple of weeks ago, we announced our partnership with the Smith Center and Hamilton for their on sale. And the way Hamilton approaches on sales is a little bit different. They just kind of let the sale happen and they take actually two to four weeks then to sort through, they don't release the ticket. So when you buy a ticket, you get an email saying, hey, you get a confirmation that your tickets will be delivered. But then they actually go through the data to see, all right, is do we think this person's a bot? Do we think they're a real person who's gonna go to the show? Are we able to connect them with any sort of secondary market activity? So there's different ways to solve it. And what's interesting about us is we're simply an enforcement mechanism, right? So from sale to scan, we're an enforcer of the ticket. And that can be if people want to not have, their tickets show up on the secondary market could also be to work with the secondary market. Again, people, our clients can put rules around tickets. We let them put the rules around the tickets that's in the best interest for their business. But other than that, we just enforce it. And so I would say that that's a big difference for us. So I actually kind of in understanding ticketing completely removed ourselves from that front end mess, right? So we're just a delivery mechanism delivery option. So in that way, we allow our clients to handle the bot problem, but in a different way, right? You could try to handle the bot problem head on at the on sale, which is tough. It's just, it's tough. Because I mean, there's so many things going on or you can let things happen and then you can start to kind of weed through and kick out what you think are our bad purchases or bad sales. And again, it's more of a business decision. So on the, like I said, we don't sell tickets. And I think that's actually a benefit for us. Cause one of the things too is, we want to be an infrastructure play that works with every system in every marketplace. And one of the ways really the only way to do that is to simply be a delivery mechanism and say you're not a sales mechanism. Because if I start selling tickets, then I'm actually competitive with a ticketing system or marketplace. Versus if I'm just delivering tickets, I can actually be an infrastructure play that helps everybody. Tell me, there's a lot of big names promoting crypto in many venues. Maybe they're not so proud of it lately with the crypto winter being what it is. But any thoughts about integrating crypto payments in or yeah, have you been approached by any of your clients about the potential for having either stable coins being used or things of that nature as part of the blockchain side of your integrations? We've had conversations and I tutor a course for Oxford University on blockchain where it's not just ticketing, it's broadly. And again, I actually tell my clients like separate us. Again, we're a delivery mechanism. So when you, Brad, if you go to the Adrian R Center Miami, you buy a ticket, you go to their website, you select their ticket like you always did, you pay for it with your credit card or however, whatever their payment rail is. Then when you get to the end, they'll either tell you, hey, your ticket's gonna be delivered digitally or you get to select and if you select digital, it's delivered through us. And the conversations I have with most of my clients around should we do crypto is completely independent of your tickets because we're not a crypto platform. Usually what I do is I ask them, okay, why from a business standpoint, does it make sense for you to accept crypto? So is it you're trying to maybe engage a new demographic? Do you see this as being some sort of currency hedge? So typically it's completely separate. So I get asked about it, but I would say, look, for them, I say crypto is just another payment mechanism potentially for you, right? So it's all I'm checking out, do I buy it in USDT or do I buy it with my Visa card? And again, completely independent of true tickets because we're after that. And so I would say that from the crypto standpoint, are our clients looking at it and interested in it? Yes, have we talked to them about it? Yes, is there any impact today for true tickets? I would say no. Most, like I said, most of my client conversations around, you have to ask yourself like, why are you doing crypto? But why are you doing NFTs? Like, what business problem are you attempting to solve or what business hypothesis are you trying to prove out? That's the more important thing. And if you think that crypto is part of it, then you should absolutely explore it. But for us, we're completely independent of any of that. Actually, what, from the participants here, does anyone have any questions for Matt? If you do, open up your microphone and go ahead. Hi, this is Uncle here. Hi, great presentation. Thanks, Matt. I have a question. What is the kind of business impact, some feedback on business impact that you would have got? For example, using your technology, was there any increase in revenue because people were able to do secondary sales or ticket distribution got better because they were able to reach people because they were able to identify them better? How does it lead to some business impact? So the business impact today is about identity and accountability, right? So if you think on the ticketing side, I mean, now that we've been in operations for two years, we have some quantifiable data around the impact, right? So we're seeing one is like a lower no-show rate, right? So people are using our tickets relative to other ticket types. They're showing up at the venue in higher propensity than others, right? This could be for several reasons. It could be that maybe brokers and scalpers are avoiding our tickets, right? So the people who are most likely to eat tickets or not go are likely those who are trying to find some sort of arbitrage. The second is because of the way our ticketing solution is constructed, it really is a live event management solution as well, right? So you're not downloading an app, it's a web app. You're able to access it and our clients are able to change things about the ticket in the event, it's such a real time. So for example, there was a show a couple, a year and a half ago in Orlando, they had an outdoor festival because they were still dealing with COVID in a thunderstorm world through red at seven o'clock and the show was supposed to start at 7 p.m. And at first they had just implemented with us and they were really concerned oh, we gotta do radio announcements, we gotta do email blasts, we gotta do phone calls telling everyone the shows, delay by 30 minutes when they kind of stopped and said actually we just need to update the system and the ticket will take care of it, right? So creating that real time connection with the actual person, it has an impact, right? So if you're notified of people, they're more likely to come and that's had a huge factor. The other thing too is the ticket buyers lately post COVID are really buying last minute. And so the ones that are buying last minute are more likely to go and that's having an effect, the other thing too is from a management standpoint on the operations side, what we're finding is a lot of customer service throughout time was dealt dealing with ticketing issues and with our service, we're seeing a significant drop in ticketing issues, right? There's a lot less fraud, there's a lot less confusion. If somebody says hey, I had a ticket, it's pretty takes minutes to just kind of get to the bottom of it. And so you're seeing box office staffs having me being much lower. It was last year, I went to the public theater the week we launched with them. And my head of sales and a couple other people associate with True Tickets, we went to one of their shows and I was asking my client, I said, look, I'm kind of curious what is the impact of True Tickets as you see it today on how you kind of ticket and how you get people into the venue. And he said, look at the box office. And I said, yeah, he's like, what do you see? I go, nobody, it was exactly, there's nobody at the box office, right? Usually we have lines with people like having problems with ticketing. We have no lines, which means I can move my CSRs around. And the other big one is fraud, right? Fraud and secondary market. I mean, we're seeing like a 90 to 95% reduction in charge backs, which is the fee that venues get if there's a fraud issue, they typically venues end up paying tens of $1,000 a year in charge backs. And so you start to see the quantifiable business impact. Right now, when it comes to distributed ledger tech the thought is in the future and this is what we're exploring now is how do we incorporate distribution channels that wanna be a part of it, right? So there's the revenue upside side of it. But we are seeing a significant impact and for anyone who's building a business leveraging this tech, I think, you know it's easy to get enamored with the tech but it's still kind of just business value proposition one on one, right? Like how can I, what does it cost? And like what's the game? What's the ROI, right? And so we're seeing significant ROI and really that's what we rely on when we talk about our service and the benefits to our clients is here's the impact we're seeing with other clients and here's what this could mean for you independent of the technology. Understood. Thanks, Matt. That was a fairly comprehensive answer. I have one more question. Yeah. What kinds of customer behavior change you are apprehensive of because you're using a new take was there some behavior scene that you were expecting on the part of the customer? You would have some hypothesis and have those hypothesis paid out? So in ticketing, it's important to distinguish who I define as a client or a customer and a consumer, right? So in ticketing, the consumer is the person using the ticket, but they're actually not the client. So there's probably two parts of it. Yeah, sorry. So I think I should have clarified. I mean the end consumer. So you're talking from like the venue side? I buy the ticket to a show. Oh, God, I got it. So on the consumer side. Yeah. So one of the things we've done is with our solution is actually done hundreds of hours of user testing with demographics that align with our clients. And what we have found our clients, one of our clients biggest concerns is adoption, right? And we're saying, hey, we've got a demographic that maybe isn't as technologically savvy. We need to be mindful of that. It's going to be hard to adopt. And really what we've done with our solution and what I think we did smartly, even with our blockchain solution is if you interacted with it, you had no idea that there was distributed ledger tech underneath it. It was simply, you just interacted with the ticket. You accessed it. There were rules around it. You can do things with it. And in many ways, what that resulted in was we built a consumer facing capability that essentially meets people where they're at, right? So think about it, we all, we do everything on our phones today, right? And by the way, that's no different if you're 20, 40, 50, 80, right? Like my mom uses Uber, my dad uses Uber. So what we like to joke about is the airline industry really kind of did all the heavy lifting to get people on their phones when it comes to ticketing. And so in many ways, on the consumer side, the patient side, when you're buying a ticket, we're just meeting you where you're at already, right? So you're going to your website, that part, nothing really has changed. The only thing that maybe has changed is how you're getting your ticket. So instead of getting a PDF print at home or something mailed to you or picking up a will call, you're getting an email at the link. You click that link and you're logging in with your venue credentials, right? So there's no true tickets is really the intel inside. And if you go to any of our clients, they're just delivering through a white label site. I mean, Boston Symphony, it's I think tickets.tanglewood.org today and you're logging in with their credentials. So from a consumer standpoint, it's really fairly straightforward and seamless. That said, it's going to look that way because we sent hundreds of hours trying to figure out what's the most efficient way to do this and what's going to resonate? What's the verbiage? What's the flow? So we spent a lot of time user testing to understand how can we make sure that our service is intuitive. In fact, with ticket sharing, what's been incredibly validating is we're live with it now pretty much all our venues. None of our venues have publicly communicated to their patrons that this feature is available. Yet in the last two weeks, we've seen thousands of tickets be shared, thousands of new accounts being created. And the vast majority of the feedback we've gotten from our clients and their patrons has been, oh, wow, this is great. This is easy. And so to me, that's validation that all that work we did in trying to understand how to make the process as straightforward and seamless and intuitive possible as working because the organic usage of the service is literally requiring no education in that people just see a share button, they click it, they go through it and done, they share the tickets and it's done. And when you're thinking about, I think one of the things in the blockchain and crypto space that's challenging is I don't think it has an adoption problem. I think it has a user experience problem. If I want to get crypto, I've got to get a MetaMask and I've got to convert. I mean, one of the big new changes is MetaMask now accepts credit cards. So I don't have to go to Coinbase. I don't have to buy on Coinbase and then convert my Ethereum to my transfer to my MetaMask account. So then buy other crypto, I can literally buy straight via my credit card on MetaMask. I'd much rather do that. That's a user experience, but that has nothing to do with tech. So when you're thinking about the solution that you're building and where I think the builders in the blockchain and the crypto space have struggled is I think they have underestimated the value of making something easy and intuitive and seamless for people. And a lot of times you hear people go, well, yeah, this is a little bit harder, but you get so much more benefit here. And that's just not how people work, right? Like people go, well, I want the benefit, but I also want this to be easy, right? And so if you can't figure out how to make that work, like your solution is not going to get adopted. An interesting analogy is think about airline Wi-Fi, right? Like 15 years ago, you just got on a plane and you accepted, you weren't going to have internet, right? So maybe you loaded up your Outlook box, maybe you did something, you watched a movie, but then airline Wi-Fi came on and now you can connect, now you have email. And so now your expectation is I'm going to be able to get work done on my flight. And what happens when the in-flight Wi-Fi doesn't work? You're pissed, because your expectations not met, right? And then you want compensation, like I should get more miles, like I wasn't able to get my work done. Same thing when you're building even an emerging tech solution, you need to understand what the critical dimensions of the customer experience or the user experience are and what their minimum expectations are. And across the board, you at least have to meet the minimum, otherwise it's not going to get adopted. And this is where again, I think in this space, because the technology is complex, right? Like, look, building distributed systems is hard. And in any one of those areas where the dimension is hard, if you're trying to get adoption, if you can't meet the minimum expectation, it's going to, you're going to struggle. And so one of the things that we've done very well is really architect our solution to be as seamless and as intuitive as possible, where you can leverage the emerging tech, but from the consumer side, you know, it's essentially a material. You're either getting what you expected or better than what you expected. Got it, thank you so much. Great questions, Ankar. Thank you very much for that participation. Any other questions from anybody? Hi, this is Ramesh. So what exactly the difference between selling the tickets versus delivering the tickets? So selling versus delivered, right? So think about it like this. Ticketmaster sells the ticket, right? So you, they're the payment rail. If I'm delivering the ticket, maybe you think about it like this, it's a package. You go onto Amazon and you buy a package, but that package can be delivered sometimes to the U.S. Postal Service, right? U.S. Postal Service isn't selling you the package for Amazon, they're just making sure that package gets delivered, right? So it's more of an infrastructure play, right? So that's the biggest thing. And when you're selling a ticket, there's a little bit of a moral hazard if you want to be an infrastructure play, because you're essentially monetizing and incentivizing on making sure you sell those tickets for as much as possible versus being a delivery mechanism only, we could be an infrastructure solution. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you. Thank you, Ramesh. Good question. Anybody else have a question for Matt? Yeah. Hey, Matt, this is Arvind here. One question about the platform, you know, I'm just joined a little bit into this call. So can I understand like from the infrastructure point of, like what type of hyper legit platform is used for this complete application, ticketing application? So, you know, I won't get too much into the tech, but we like to say we're built on hyper ledger fabric. We run on IBM blockchain and we deploy to Google Cloud. Okay, good enough, thank you. Yeah, I gotta be careful, right? Thank you, Venkat. Any other questions for Matt? You know, Brett, another way to kind of add to Ramesh's question, right? So when we think about the internet, you know, there's the application layer, right? And that's where, you know, Amazon and a lot of other companies monetize and those is the infrastructure layer, which is TCPIP, right? So the infrastructure layer delivers, doesn't sell. And so when you think about true tickets, our goal is to be that infrastructure layer that facilitates essentially effective and transparent and efficient ticketing, the application layers, let ticketing systems and others sell tickets and we can just process. So we really want to be the pipe. So if you can be the infrastructure, you can do it for all systems in all marketplaces. The minute you start to be like a consumer facing application, you start to create a challenge if you want to, you know, be that infrastructure play. Makes sense. The, I think the whole concept of blockchain and as you alluded to earlier is that it's invisible. It's to the end user and they're never going to know whether there's any blockchain in the backend and they shouldn't. And in some cases, they shouldn't be told either. I think because of the opinions that they may come up with. Well, hey, nobody advertises themselves as like a relational database company. That is right, exactly, distributed ledger. Any other questions for Matt? We're closing in on the one hour period here and Matt, that was a phenomenal presentation. And we want to, Hyperledger wants to thank you. I want to thank you very much for taking the time for putting all that together. And we definitely have learned something today and a better appreciation for what you're doing. So thank you. Awesome, Brad, thanks for reaching out and happy to do it. Thank you so much. And we'll make sure this gets up. I'll send you a link to the recording on the YouTube channel for everybody. Also in the chat, I put a link to Matt's old pining on NFTs and pickets. So that's something we'll put those links up in the YouTube video, the Hyperledger channel. So thank you all for attending, Matt. Thank you very much for taking the time again. And it was a fantastic presentation. Thank you so much. Awesome, thanks, Brad. Thanks, everyone. Take care, everybody. Thank you, bye-bye.