Your friend Catherine loves The Dallas Mavericks and she got you some tickets! Hooray! But deep down you are really a Lakers fan and you don't really want to go but the ticket was kind of expensive.
Thank you Catherine for being such a good friend and getting me a courtside seat ticket that costs a fortune.
Your alternative is to try to sell it (and maybe for less than she got it for) and try not to get scammed (or knifed) while selling it. So much stress for having good friends.
Enter NFT Tickets
Fortunately, your ticket was actually an NFT ticket. That means that you can sell it on one of the existing platforms pretty easily and probably at a higher price. If everything goes as planned, you should be able to sell it in under a minute or even put it up for auction.
But Catherine is devastated that you want to sell her gift (and make a profit off of it). So you decide to go to the event. And it is actually pretty fun! The check-in is like a normal ticket with a QR code but what is epic is that the DallasM has "airdropped" (lingo for sending you for free) a new NFT that unlocks a hoodie. BOOM! Oh and now you have access to the highlights of the show! And you can sell your collectible ticket after the event!
This.is.awesome.
Why NFT Tickets Are the Future
If there is one utility to NFTs, it is the ability to resell your tickets without having to jump through hoops or pay crazy fees. And I know this could be a heaven for scalpers (and hell for everyone else) but bear with me.
The future looks like this:
1. I buy my ticket with Ether for the Dallas Mavericks vs LA Lakers
2. I can resell the ticket if I want to and the team gets a cut from resales - because that's how NFTs work (and blacklist scalpers)
3. I check-in with my ticket without any complicated apps, can get more NFTs as airdrops if Dallas wins (and I can keep them as memorabilia or sell them)
4. My NFT ticket can also change after the game - for example, to reflect the score (see later on: dynamic NFTs)
Why NFT Tickets Are Not the Future
Tickets must be bought and sold with Ether and that means some initial friction. I've seen tons of new NFT platforms and NFT ticketing solutions that are destined to crash and burn because they plan to sell NFTs with fiat ($ or euro).
Why fiat sucks: Because if you really want to participate in selling your NFTs, stacking them up, unlocking content, and doing all these crazy things in the Metaverse you need to be on the blockchain. If I am just an entry in your database and I am not really the owner of my NFT why are we doing this?
For example, after the initial friction of setting up a meta mask wallet, users that bought my NFT tickets for my conference were able to immediately resell them in a HUGE market (OpenSea) or use them to unlock videos from the conference.
Being "on the chain" is hands down the best long-term experience. Unless you don't want people to resell your NFTs.
And that's it. That's the only thing. I used NFT tickets for my conference and almost 1000 new wallets were created by people who haven't heard about NFTs before.
It is not rocket science and this is how you grow your community.
Send me an email if you want to exchange any ideas.
Also published on https://jon.io/how-nfts-will-change-events-and-why-mark-cuban-is-a-genius.