Annika Monari and Alan Vey - Aventus- Ethereum London

okay hey everyone we just wanted to start off with a brief introduction of who we are considering our presence in the space isn't as as big as the guys who presented before us so my name is anneka Minari I just finished my masters here at Imperial College doing particle physics I was doing data-driven detection of different particles between here and CERN from my thesis and I started looking at blockchain around the time of fizzle and Alan and I met during our bachelor's degrees and then we started working together hello everyone can you hear me properly okay yeah okay so as I like I said my name is Alan Vega we both studied here at Imperial I did computer science and then focused on artificial intelligence for my Master's I've been interested in the blockchain space and sort of Bitcoin days only really got to delve deeper into the topic in my thesis year around 2015 which was on blockchain base film right distribution also on aetherium this was supervised by Professor William rotten belt who there are kind host yet today the director of the cryptocurrency research and engineering Center was been involved in our project from the beginning and still sits on our advisory boards been a key component of getting us to this point so yeah we found at Aventis around I think it was April 2016 and that's how we gather started down this road so that's enough about us just to ask you guys something how many of you have been to an event in the last while that you bought a ticket for some kind of popular event yeah the vast majority of people as we thought so the problems we'll be discussing here are very relevant to to anybody who knows everything about the event space you've probably encountered them yourself here's a quick video [Music] [Applause] most fans you want to be inside the hips summer tour couldn't get a ticket they didn't really stand a chance within seconds of going on sale a third of the tickets were scooped up by resellers another third by automated buying software called BOTS our system was set up to hit 50 shows in one hour ken Llosa a former big-time scalper used BOTS to snatch up tickets we made it to that you could just had to hit one button and you could buy a hundred two seats at once you know we had the capability of buying 15,000 tickets in two minutes they then appear on resale sites like StubHub marked up of course not all brokers use bots so we headed to Las Vegas to a broker convention but how do those brokers get the tickets if it's a full-time job you'll make sure you do everything you can to get me because again what's happening that a minute after tickets go on sale they're all gone that's where the policy begins most of the best tickets for most of the shows are never sold to the public big-time broker Don Vaquero says don't blame folks like him if the industry itself holding back the tickets where they don't disclose to the fans that they're holding fact the seats tickets do end up with the band the promoter and the venue often some of the best seats are held back by the artists for the agency for the building so after fan clubs and certain pre-sales fans really don't stand a chance former Ticketmaster boss said 90% of tickets could be gone before the average fan can even buy them maybe call them CBC News Kingston so that gives you a nice sort of introduction to - one of the main problems that we're trying to solve which is a problem around pouting now touting or scalping as it's called it's basically the process where all sorts of tickets are bought up in primary releases either by bus or by big groups of people and then resold for inflated prices on secondary markets Ticketmaster estimates that nearly 60% of their inventory is sold to bots for any popular event now these are then marked up and available for a thousand to three thousand percent the original face value minutes after the event has happened her recent example of this is Adele CR in London she had a concert in Wembley the face value of tickets was maybe 175 pounds less than ten minutes later these tickets were nine thousand pounds on StubHub so really crazy increase in price now why this is a problem is it affect the fans and it affects the artists so obviously fans don't want to have to pay more money than they have to to see the show and it reflects badly on the artist so that's our first main problem here we're addressing four in total the second of which is counterfeits so these bots software or the spa software will buy up tickets and automatically listed on multiple secondary ticketing markets and let's say stop half the ago grows these kind of places one of the tickets will sell and then the rest of the tickets on other platforms become counterfeits quite often so either you'll never receive the ticket or you'll receive a ticket that doesn't give you admittance to the event in the end what you also have is it's illegal but around all sorts of any venue you go to if it's a football match in London or whatever it is you can find tickets being sold at the gate this is well around the stadium you just go to an alley around the corner you can typically find tickets a lot of these again are counterfeit now a big problem is also fraudulent websites or events themselves so people promoting events that don't actually exist or website claiming to sell tickets when they actually don't it's all kind of fits into the same area here now the third problem that we are looking at is that of oversight there's sort of two components to this on the one hand we're talking about consumer confusion so one of our advisors professor Mike waters and he recently did a study for the government in the UK on the secondary ticketing markets and what he found is one in four customers do not know if they're buying from a primary site or a secondary site or even some kind of site that's known to do a lot of fraudulent activity there's no central place you can check where should I buy tickets where can i where can't I very difficult to figure out where your tickets are coming from now that's on the side of the sort of ticket buyer if we look to the other side we have the events themselves so as was touched on in that video you have all sorts of problems around first of all ticket sales so an event or sell have let's say an early release a VIP release and then they're sort of general sale and they'll always claim to sell out very quickly in any of these now what often happens even if they don't set up is that repackage these tickets put them in a future release or even worse take them directly out of supply and never get to be sold on the primary market and they go directly into secondary markets just to kind of boost their profit margins there the final problem we're looking at if you get a nice solution through the the previously mentioned one is that of promotion and reaching a wide enough audience so 35% that the CEO of Ticketmaster estimates that 35% of their ticket inventory grows unsold and when you ask people Wireless is the cool reason as well I didn't know the event was happening another thing to look at you have 60% of 16 to 25 year old concerts or festival attendees state that they would definitely go to events if they were more reasonably priced so clearly you can see if we solve some of these problems we can actually get more people attending event now that's enough around the problems I want to talk to you a little bit about the ticketing market in general you're probably thinking why hasn't anybody solved any of these I'm sure many of you are aware of some of these problems already what why hasn't it been tackled so far as soon as you dig a little bit deeper and look at let's look at things from the primary and the secondary market perspective the economic incentives do not line up or they don't encourage people to solve these problems on the one hand in the primary market you have first of all your ticket sell out foster and you're guaranteed to sell out all your tickets even if not per ticket some of the attendee event because they might not only sell on the secondary market but would be sort of bought you guaranteed to sell out very quickly and you're guaranteed to sell all of well so your inventory out and very quickly so what this means is from a business perspective why would you not want this to happen it's very clear that it benefits the primary resellers to have this functionality in the secretary market of it's simpler 25% of any resale on a secondary market goes to the secondary market platform so higher the average price of ticket the more money you make off of it again there's no incentive there to change what's currently happening now there have been some attempts made to solve this and they typically fall into two categories so we look at things from a technological or religious legislative perspective on the technological front again kind of breaks into two general categories you have data driven techniques so you'll basically this boils down most of the time to trying to identify if the person listing a ticket is an actual person or an automated boss that's just we've just brought it up in a primary relief all sorts of data metrics around prices and whatnot also going to this but as you can see it hasn't really had the desired effect and the cool reason for this is it's a very difficult problem to solve you know somebody behind the computer is actually an automated bot or a human like in the online advertising industry this is also a huge problem you can typically just use machine learning to learn the characteristics of how a user would like click around on a website and then emulate that with a bot so this is a not really something that can be solved easily in that scenario the other category Shiar is putting caps on secondary markets so either we're looking at not allowing retail at all which is obviously a bad idea what if I can't go to an event I need to be able to get rid of a ticket I'm not incentivized to buy the ticket in the first place if there's a smallest chance I won't be able to attempt and the second point just kind of capping resale prices so let's say you can resell at face value or below now the problem here is you create sort of black markets on the side because I could say hey I'll send you 2,000 pounds if you list your ticket on the platform we do the exchange and it adheres to the rules but actually there's a black market offline that's still circumventing any of the of the measures here now that's the technological solution from a legislative perspective it's been attempted to be solved all over the place so here in the UK football tickets can only be bought from authorized resellers but as you see outside of any football field you can find tickets just there to buy sometimes they've fraudulent but oftentimes they're perfectly good the u.s. tried banning this a while back and then they gave up on it because they quoted it's just too hard you don't have enough oversight to actually see and enforce this metric it's not worth the effort even in Australia you see they say that law is only ten percent above face value you may resell tickets or and exactly what I was discussing these black markets on the side you start seeing them appear there so this finally brings us to what we're doing at Aventis what we're trying to do is tackle the whole thing well obviously it's a technological solution but what we try to do is build an economic model using the etherion blockchain to address the various problems I just discussed now how this will work is for the touting first of all we guarantee or we force all transactions to go through a blockchain based protocol so it's a completely open protocol for anybody to use but all transactions need to flow through it now this means that you can reliably enforce maximum and minimum caps on resellers tickets and even derive certain what the event organiser or artist can derive revenue from the secondary market sell the value basically stays with the event itself when we're talking about counterfeits the properties the blockchain is obviously immutable and quite transparent so what this means is we can create the ticket the event organiser can create various ticket categories and you can check that you do own the ticket you've been told that you've been sold and you can make sure that none of the kind of shady dealings of the applications and whatnot happens off on the site or any black-market appear off the site the final point jars that are oversized and again it's it's a transparency of the blockchain you can see how they have tickets flow where they go to and you can make sure that none of the shady behavior is actually happening I'm going to pass you a botanical now to talk you through the details of what we do thanks Hey so just to add to that final point that I'm the kind of ultimate value proposition of using a blockchain based economic model is the ability to let event organizers reach a wider audience with their events by incentivizing people to effectively become promoters so what we can do if you show the next line is we can disintermediate the way current ticketing applications work so if you think of a ticketing applications there are kind of two sides to to the coin so on one side you have the creation and management of the event and tickets and the event organiser setting standards that they want for their events and then on the other side you have to build the user base for your ticketing application that maybe has I don't know a specific demographic or something like this that encourages event organizers to use your app because you have coming back and looking for you know new events to go to so we can say is okay why don't we separate those two processes completely and what we can do is build a protocol where we have a pool of event let's say and people can contribute those events if they're an app that's particularly good at you know with good event management with event creation and then other apps become promoters or have you know specific audience that's it audiences that they target like for example I don't know a Star Wars fan club or something like that and they can sell tickets and gain permissions for doing so from these events in the pool so yeah that kind of brings us ultimately to what we're trying to do which is build a a rail or a open standard a global standard for the ticketing industry that's more secure fair and transparent than the current industry and that isn't controlled by any one entity and yeah we want to basically change the way ticket exchange happens and make it completely free and open to use and allow allow anyone to plug in and use it as they would like based on what they're good at doing so how do we well we've got a architecture very similar to gnosis we've got a protocol layer services layer and an applications layer i'll mainly talk about the protocol because that's quite different than than those things so yeah I'll go into two things here so one is the kind of controlling of touting how do we do that and the second one is how we improve the kind of promotional and oversights aspect of the ticketing industry so again just just to recap the protocol is really that global standard that we're talking about here that anyone can plug into and you know ticketing applications can contribute to the pool promoters can take events from the pool and sell tickets to them and gain commissions for doing so but yeah so now if we take the housing controls this is quite an important thing to do we need to ensure that all transactions occur through the protocol because as soon as you have people being able to transfer something off the protocol in conjunction with something on the protocol well then you have black markets again and the controls at the secondary market don't work anymore so basically we have two ways that we need to we need to solve that from happening so number one we associate an identity with a ticket and this can be like a credit card or an ID document or actually a photo of the person's face and this is this would be chosen by the event organiser there and the only way this can change is through the protocol itself so it has to be by the sale of a ticket through the protocol and again it can't be something like a mobile phone identifier because for a 25,000 pound like UFC ticket you could just sell a 50 pound mobile phone it wouldn't be a problem and really what you're trying to solve here is the selling of private keys but yeah so on this side just just to be clear we're very conscious of the privacy of uploading that information and none of its stored in clear text on the blockchain I could go into more detail if it's people interested but you know like hashes are compared and images are encrypted and stuff like that so yeah and then on the other side what we have to ensure is that in the secondary market sellers don't know who they're selling to and what the consequence of this is that you need a one-to-many mapping between seller and people who want to buy the ticket so you need like a bidding period what people can say okay I want to buy this ticket and in the trivial case of like a festival where one ticket grant you entry and it doesn't even matter where you sit this isn't a very difficult problem to solve you just randomly allocate it gets more complicated when you have a stadium for example and my two friends are sat in row two and I only want to go if I can get a ticket that's close to them and then imagine if you're buying tickets for even more people it gets quite complicated so to do this we designed a process which again I won't go into too much because you guys will get bored but basically we have an interval system and if you divide the kind of secondary market time period into intervals and then in each one of those we have a little rolling window that's three time periods long in the first one sellers put up the ticket and they say okay I want to sell it at what about 50 pounds in the next interval people bid on different configurations containing that ticket then in the third interval people who we call matches in our system basically call into the code and settle these tickets through a probabilistic allocation and then close all the other bids of that person so that's kind of how we how we do this and we're working on other ways to to do this as well but yeah so yeah the final thing I wanted to talk about with the protocol was the kind of improvements to oversight and promotion so as Alan said I mean we have ridiculous losses every year to to people buying tickets from fake sites or buying tickets to fake events like Justin Bieber playing in my basement I mean like it happens it really does and it's like 40 million a year the Metropolitan Police estimated for the Olympics so like you can imagine and so we do we really have to be conscious of this when we have that open protocol of events that people can sell tickets for because now if you know you have your whatever your Star Wars user base selling a fake ticket to some premiere I mean you'll lose all you'll lose all those users because they're buying fake tickets at stuff like that so what we do is we implement a kind of stake weighted voting system with a state that kind of represents reputation or activity in the system you know how much you care about this open protocol and we verify the events in the protocol but we also have a white list of applications using the protocol so I don't know if you've seen recently with IPOs people in the psych loops before being like open money to this address we don't want that kind of thing happening in you know in for event tickets from applications so yeah we have that white list that people kind of vote on and it's a membership that recurs and you also have a pool of events that you phone on so yeah so yeah now on the last two layers I'll just only speak briefly the services layer just makes mainstream integration of our of our protocol easier so this is like a theorem account management api's crypto conversion from fiat since tickets are actually bought and East it's ether or EOC 20 tokens yeah we mainstream users won't want to do that right so we have to allow them to convert to this and and then other things like machine vision for like some of the identity recognition at the door those those are the kind of services we offer there so yeah the applications layer this is our primary audience this is who we're targeting with this system and this is anyone from existing ticketing applications to deaf developers but then to regular people like social influences or like I was saying before you know people who have an audience who they can sell tickets for that fit some of the other products they're selling and so what we try and do is we make it as easy for them as possible so one of the services is template you is that they can use the other thing is we're going to have a new incentive pot and we're going to be hosting hackathons and stuff like that and we also have our own front-end and we're going to be contributing events to the protocol some announcements are coming soon about that but yeah we're going to be contributing is that that people can sell tickets for as well so yeah that's pretty much the whole system yeah please follow us on Twitter or join us on slack if this interests you and you want to discuss it so that [Applause] you

Channel: Stephan Tual

Views: 3,173

Rating: 4.891892 out of 5

Keywords: ethereum, blockchain, aventus, london, meetup

Id: 2bzhFgcCEoE

Length: 22min 38sec (1358 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2017