The Future of Event Access: Revocable, Resalable, Transparent Passes

Secondary markets like StubHub and Viagogo operate as black boxes, extracting ~30% fees from fans while providing zero visibility or control to artists/venues.

• Captive Audiences: Fans are locked into specific resale platforms.
• Revenue Leakage: Artists see no upside from secondary sales.
• Fraud Risk: Counterfeit tickets remain a persistent issue.

Smart contracts enforce resale rules at the protocol level, enabling features impossible with legacy systems.

• Dynamic Pricing: Enforce price caps or Dutch auctions to combat scalping.
• Royalty Enforcement: Guarantee 5-10% royalties flow back to creators on every resale.
• Transfer Restrictions: Limit resales to specific marketplaces (e.g., a curated DAO marketplace) or whitelisted wallets.

PDF tickets and barcodes are static digital files, easily duplicated and sold multiple times, leading to gate conflicts and customer service nightmares.

• No Revocation: Once issued, a fraudulent ticket cannot be invalidated.
• No Composability: Tickets cannot interact with other on-chain apps (DeFi, loyalty programs).
• Centralized Failure Points: Issuer databases are honeypots for attacks.

Tickets as non-transferable (Soulbound) NFTs in a user's wallet that can be programmatically revoked or validated.

• Real-Time Revocation: Invalidate lost/stolen tickets instantly; re-issue to rightful owner.
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Prove ticket ownership for entry without revealing wallet address.
• Post-Event Utility: Token transforms into a provable proof-of-attendance protocol (POAP) or unlocks future airdrops.

Fans juggle multiple apps (Ticketmaster, wallet, resale site) and must manage complex transactions (gas, bridging) for a simple task: gaining entry.

• Wallet Friction: Seed phrases and gas fees are non-starters for mainstream users.
• Cross-Chain Chaos: Event on Polygon, but fan's assets are on Arbitrum.
• Checkout Abandonment: >50% drop-off occurs at crypto payment steps.

Users express an intent ('I want front-row seats for Taylor Swift') and a solver network (like UniswapX or Across) handles the complexity.

• Gasless Transactions: Sponsors or apps pay gas via ERC-4337 smart accounts.
• Cross-Chain Execution: Solvers bridge assets and mint tickets seamlessly.
• One-Click Checkout: Fiat on-ramps (Stripe) and social logins (Privy) abstract crypto entirely.

Traditional NFT tickets are inert assets. They can't be revoked after the event, creating a secondary market for invalid passes. Organizers lose control and revenue.

• Zero Post-Event Utility: NFTs become worthless or, worse, fraudulent collectibles.
• No Dynamic Pricing: Fixed supply with no mechanism for official resale or price caps.
• Lost Royalties: Secondary sales often bypass the original issuer entirely.

Protocols like Manifold and Thirdweb enable NFTs with mutable states and embedded logic. The pass is a smart contract, not a static JPEG.

• Time-Based Expiry: The NFT can be programmed to self-destruct or become non-transferable after the event ends.
• Enforced Royalties: Smart contracts guarantee a 5-10% fee flows back to the organizer on every resale.
• Conditional Access: Gate entry via on-chain checks (e.g., holder status, token-gated experiences).

Resale happens on opaque, generic platforms like OpenSea. There's no dedicated liquidity pool for tickets, leading to high spreads and slow sales.

• High Friction: Users must list on a separate marketplace, creating a poor UX.
• Price Discovery Lag: No automated market makers (AMMs) for instantaneous, fair-price resale.
• Siloed Liquidity: Each event's passes are trapped in their own illiquid market.

Projects are building AMMs specifically for time-sensitive assets. Think Uniswap V3 concentrated liquidity, but for tickets.

• Instant Liquidity: Organizers or LPs can seed pools, allowing attendees to sell back at a known price curve.
• Controlled Economics: Pools can have price ceilings and decay functions as the event approaches.
• Integrated UX: The resale market is built directly into the minting platform, a model seen in SeatlabNFT.

Buyers can't verify if a secondary market listing is a valid, un-revoked pass. This erodes trust and inflates customer support costs.

• No Validity Proof: Marketplaces display all NFTs equally, with no real-time status check.
• Sybil Listings: Scalpers can list the same invalid pass across multiple platforms.
• Trust-Based Systems: Reliance on centralized platforms to delist fraud, which is slow and reactive.

Infrastructure like EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) allows issuers to make revocable, on-chain statements about an NFT's status. Combined with ZK proofs, this enables private validity checks.

• Immutable Revocation Log: A single, canonical source of truth for a pass's validity.
• Selective Disclosure: A buyer can receive a ZK proof the pass is valid without revealing their identity or the token ID until purchase.
• Interoperable Standard: Any marketplace or wallet can query the same registry, creating a unified fraud defense layer.