Online ticket sales is a massive market a large part of ticket sales is already performed online. It is also one of the markets that clearly sees a fraud issue since many tickets are created at home using your personal printer. Additionally, the ticket black market regularly sees counterfeit tickets.
Thinking about the use case of online ticket sales blockchain seems an obvious solution, but there are some features that, from my perspective, require a very special blockchain to achieve the ultimate goal. This is where Helios (HLS) comes into place.
Helios Protocol is a mindblowing new blockchain project, for those of you that are not yet familiar with it I have copied the introduction of there website here:
"An infinitely scalable cryptocurrency and smart contract platform based on DAG + blockchains. The Helios platform is designed from the ground up to futureproof with secure, high speed, and low fee transactions, and to enable truly decentralized and democratic applications." Source: https://heliosprotocol.io
Let´s take a closer look at the online ticket sale requirements and why Helios might be a perfect solution:
Speed
Did you ever try to buy tickets for comic-con, a Foo-Fighters or Madonna concert or Wacken Hard Rock festival and servers and you missed the chance by some milliseconds? Did the transaction just take too long to get the last tickets? Here might be the solution.
As opposed to many other blockchain protocols, Helios is designed for maximum speed since a transaction can be signed between wallets. This is absolutely unique, as each wallet holds its own blockchain. Once signed, of course, the transactions are synchronized with the main chain, but this does not have to happen at the moment of transaction.
This offers an ultimate speed advantage to other Blockchains such as Ethereum, EOS or TRON.
While the possible speed to forward your transaction is one component, Helios will also allow you to prioritize your transaction to a degree, this is another unique feature.
Scalability
Keeping the example of comic-con, you may remember the Big Bang Theory episode where the website and booking system were totally overloaded based on the massive amount of transactions and people trying to purchase tickets?
Once more Helios Protocols ability to utilize the user wallets as a scalability factor offers an enormous option to scale transactions. Since the general blockchain will not have to approve all transactions immediately, a massive amount of purchases could be running in parallel without a congestion of the main blockchain. (This is assuming though, that the ticket provider offers sufficient transaction peers!)
Comparing this to Ethereum the actual amount of ticket orders for comic-con would most likely lead to the congestion of the entire chain.
Transaction cost
As you are purchasing a concert or convention ticket you do not wish to pay a massive amount for the actual transaction. The organizer shares this goal with you, thus Helios is once more a great choice!
The blockchain is designed to run based on very low transactional cost. It is based on PoS (Proof of Stake) and does not require expensive mining equipment to run.
If we would try to run our tickets sale application on PoW networks such as Ethereum the transaction cost might be influenced directly by the pure amount of transactions, therefore transaction cost would most likely increase based on the number of requests.
Fraud protection
Counterfeit tickets are a massive issue for online ticket sales. As of today, it is hardly possible to validate if the purchase ticket is indeed valid since the ticket ID might just be copied. Additionally, it is hard to validate it the ticket is really valid. Who knows which security marks are correct or fake?
Of course, the ticket ID will be part of the Helios Blockchain. As it will be unique, you can track it inside the chain without issues. It will also be linked to your wallet public and private key which offers the ultimate link and approval that you indeed own the ticket.
Showing your wallet with the ticket upon entry, based on data matrix barcode, will allow the security guards to register you.
There will be no other valid ticket than those inside the Helios blockchain, it will simply not possible to reuse the same ticket number as the printed tickets have seen their last days.
Ticket reselling
Today many organizers of concerts and conventions try to assure that you are not reselling your ticket to prevent a black market sale. Additionally KYC (Know Your Customer) is a security measure that gets (unfortunately) more important. Both require you to approve that the tickets are for yourself and add your name to them before you enter.
The ultimate enforcement can be achieved by linking the ticket to your wallet within the smart contract. If a ticket lock is defined inside the smart contract you will not be able to resell the tickets once in your wallet. Since you might have ordered more than one ticket this could cause issues though.
For those organizers allowing transfer of the tickets, Helios still offers a unique feature. Sale between wallets utilizing the smart contract to assure payment. As PayPal and eBay , the wallet will include the required security features for both sides. Once more, this transaction will be performed between the wallets of buyer and seller without influencing the main blockchain immediately.
Required ticket information or possible rich content connected to it would be transferred between wallets without any impact on the blockchain operation. This is, once more, absolutely unique to Helios Protocol!
Conclusion
Online ticket sales are very close to a revolution assisting all sides. Helios Protocol offers some great options for supporting this revolution! The combination of scalabilityy, speed, cos, and security is unique with the blockchain market and will surely be a game changerr too many businesses.
By the way, Helios Protocol currently runs an AirDrop campaign. Earn up to 2,500 HLS! More information can be found here: ~~~ embed:1018935576165167104" twitter metadata:SGVsaW9zUGxhdGZvcm18fGh0dHBzOi8vdHdpdHRlci5jb20vSGVsaW9zUGxhdGZvcm0vc3RhdHVzLzEwMTg5MzU1NzYxNjUxNjcxMDQifA== ~~~