Disclaimer: I will be taking part in the Aventus ICO (Initial Coin Offering). My reasoning behind why I have done so is explained below. I am in no other way affiliated with the company but believe in the project and the opportunity it presents to individuals, and the ability to solve a very real world problem. I am not a financial advisor and am merely presenting my opinion. Do your own research before investing into any ICO.
On a side note, if you agree with my thoughts on the prospects of this opportunity, please feel free to up-vote my post to help spread the word!
Introduction
The live entertainment industry is huge. I don’t really need to emphasize its size in too much detail as it will be apparent to any human with a pulse. Global ticket sales are projected to grow to $23 billion in 2021. Music events alone are seeing 7% PA growth. This is worth a read to find out more about the market and how it's expanding.
The main issue that the industry faces surrounds the way that tickets are bought and sold. These problems occur on several levels:
- Mainstream resellers fees. Perhaps the least important issue, but one we will touch on is the high fees that the likes of Ticketmaster charge. These fees reduce the profit of event organizers and increase the cost to individuals who purchase these tickets.
- Touts/bots. Many tickets are bought by touts who have bots that are programmed to purchase large quantities of tickets when they are released onto the market. This reduces the supply of face-value priced tickets that are available to genuine fans which leads me onto my next point.
- Price manipulation/inflation. The secondary market is unregulated, and it is here where many of the main issues arise. Tickets that were bought by touts are resold on the secondary market for huge profits. For example, Adele tickets that are normally sold on the primary market for £50-100 and are then sold on for many hundreds or even thousands of pounds. This is even happening with theatre productions. Last year tickets for the Harry Potter musical, with a maximum face-value of £140 were being resold for almost £9000. Pretty much every in-demand live event is facing the same problem.
- Counterfeiting. In many cases, when resellers bulk buy tickets, they list the same ticket on multiple secondary market platforms. The issue comes when the ticket is sold and the reseller doesn’t remove it from the other platforms. It is then sold as a counterfeit.
The following is a good article to learn more about the problems that the ticket industry is facing: https://www.consumerreports.org/money/why-ticket-prices-are-going-through-the-roof/.
The Aventus concept/vision
Aventus is an exciting startup that aims to revolutionize the ticketing marketplace and rectify many of the problems I have discussed.
By utilizing blockchain, they will be able to stamp-out the persistent fraud and manipulation of pricing. This is a win not just for event organizers, but for the fans, who will stand a much better chance of buying a ticket to an event at a fair price.
Another interesting innovation is that Aventus will allow anyone to set up a market for a live event and sell tickets by de-siloing traditional ticketing databases and allowing any sales channel to bid on ticketing inventory, sell tickets for an event, and gain revenue from doing so. This essentially means you, or I, could become an events promoter.
Potential seems limitless and demand for the Aventus platform could come from pretty much anywhere where an event is to be held. One market that just sprang to mind is the hundreds of Student Unions across the UK and their international equivalents.
The coin/token. One of the key aspects I look at when analysing an ICO is how the coin/token relates to the project itself, and how dependent the project is on it. With some ICOs you look at an idea that encompasses a coin that doesn’t necessarily need to be used for the project/platform to function. This isn’t the case with Aventus. I don’t want to regurgitate already published information, when it has already been explained perfectly, so I would recommend reading the “AVT’s Use Cases” part of this article.
AVT tokens will be limited to a maximum supply of 10 million with 60% being sold in the crowd sale, 19.5% on “new user incentives”, 18% to staff/founders/advisors/corporate partners, and 2.5% on bounties that are issued to help with promotion.
The chart below shows where the crowdsale funds will be allocated:
The team. Aventus was co-founded by Alan Vey and Annika Monari. Alan has a Masters degree in Computing from Imperial College London and wrote his thesis on blockchain-based film rights distribution. Annika has a Masters in physics, also from Imperial College, and did her thesis in artificial intelligence-based particle physics with the CMS experiment at CERN.
The rest of the team is stacked full of clearly talented individuals. They have seven full time staff that have a good spread of experience across blockchain, programming, and the entertainment industry. There are also seven advisors onboard, each offering high level experience in fields from financial advice to cryptocurrency research.
Pre-ICO. I always like to see a pre-ICO reach its hardcap and this is what happened with Aventus, which sold out in 4 days, raising 27,000 ETH in the process.
“Buzz-factor” and Community. There seem to be many, many people interested in this project and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the ICO sell out within hours. The bitcointalk.org thread on the Aventus ICO is 33 pages long and its slack channel has almost 5000 members. If each of the slack members purchases 12 ETH of AVT, the hard cap will be reached. This alone is probably unlikely but when you factor in non-slack members and potential VC and institutional investors, it is quite reasonable to assume that the hardcap of 60,000 ETH will be raised. The following post from its site further fortifies this assumption:
https://blog.aventus.io/white-list-update-6245b4d4bb3d
Aventus’ website. From an aesthetics perspective, the website is probably one of the best I’ve seen from a tech startup. The white, purple, and pink over black color scheme is ideal for the industry it is looking to dominate. In terms of information, the site offers everything I am interested in. There is a blog with regular updates, a roadmap to mass market adoption, and a highly-detailed whitepaper.
The one downside, as we often find with similar startups, is the domain extension the site is running on. Rather than using Aventus.io, I would far prefer to see it using Aventus.com. Unfortunately, an established business is already using this domain.
The Name. Aventus as a name suits the project perfectly. It is a nice play on the words “event” and “us” and importantly is memorable and easily pronounced.
Conclusion
As an ICO speculator, I look for certain criteria to be satisfied. Is the project one that solves a real-world problem and is that problem something that resonates with me? Is the team solid? I also ask myself whether the startup has a clearly explained whitepaper and roadmap, among many other things. While analyzing the Aventus project almost all my criteria are satisfied.
Concerns
Although almost everything seems to be going for the Aventus project, there are a couple of small concerns:
- The core team is very young but they seem to have compensated for this by having a pool of highly experienced advisors at their disposal.
- As previously mentioned, I am not a huge fan of the .io domain extension. This though seems to be pretty much part-and-parcel with many startup tech companies these days.
I should also add is that I haven’t experimented with the product/platform itself so can’t comment on the usability of it. For those of you with programming knowledge, it can be found here. If you have tested it then I would love to hear your feedback, below.
Thanks for reading and don't forget to vote the article up if you enjoyed my contribution! You can also follow me for future ICO insights.
interesting. this is a great idea among the many that are around now utilising blockchain tech. I will check this out. :-)
I really think it could be a game-changer. It's so exciting seeing all of this innovation happen thanks to blockchain. We just have to keep our feet on the ground and do out best to avoid the many scam setups that are out there asking for out money.
indeed. I'm researching like mad as i can't afford to lise any dough!
ICO sale begins in 12 hours FYI and it looks like it will sell out very fast. If you're going to invest then I'd suggest doing so as soon as it opens https://sale.aventus.io/.
It seems the ICO is on the 6th of September and the whitelist application was until 28th of August. But I will invest some money nevertheless. I like the idea behind it. Thanks for the share! Have an upvote.
THAT is information I probably should have included in the post. I call your upvote with an upvote!
That is fine - you already gave a lot of information. And I call your upvote-upvote with my upvote!
Good form, sir!
i have one question for you guys.what is more important for you money or time. think about it
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Really great post. Aventus looks really editing to me. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
The only problem I see, is that will be hard for the average Adele fan to purchase tickets on a blockchain based system. There need to be easy to use Websites that allow buying tickets directly in fist money without the user noticing that Aventus runs in the background.
What is the exact benefit over the current system? As far as I understand it, it is still possible to buy tickets in bulk to sell them later for profit. And how would the tickets be checked when entering the event? Can you maybe give some more info on these questions? Thank you.
Thanks for the show of confidence.
Ticket buyers play no part in the Crypto aspect - they purchase with fiat through partner channels. As I understand it, the company is looking at partnering up with companies along the lines of Spotify, Soundcloud and other websites/services where there is a potential market and tickets can be sold. I suppose you could potentially see tickets to a Man Utd game being sold on Manutd.com where the Aventus platform will be utilised. Disclaimer: these are just examples of the sort of potential partnerships that would make sense. As far as I'm aware no deals have been setup yet with said businesses.
I had to chat with a member of the staff on the Slack channel regarding your other points (I'm taking no credit for these answers :)):
"Yes, in the Aventus system you can theoretically bulk buy tickets and resell them for a higher price but since Aventus eliminates black markets and allows event organisers to control the entire lifecycle of tickets, e.g. set price caps and derive revenue in secondary markets, their risk in buying up tickets is significantly higher as their upside is much lower due to the restrictions. They disincentivse the behaviour economically, since that is truly the only way to prevent this behaviour.
Tickets will be in the form of QR codes that will be checked at the door. To eliminate black markets, an identity will have to be presented as well such as an ID, credit card, voice recording of the person speaking, or even just phone identifier, so that people cannot sell private keys. Note - event organisers can choose to switch off identity checks for some tickets that are less in demand if they please."
If you are considering taking part in the ICO then I would definitely suggest joining the slack channel: https://aventuscommunity.slack.com
Thank you for your very long and good answer, you helped to clear many things up. Don't you think it would be possible to black-market sell tickets off-chain? You could buy tickets and then "gift" them to other wallets in exchange for off-chain payments. Or sell them for a reasonable price and charge extra off-chain. Are measured in place to prevent this?
Post whitelist ICO starts in 12 hours, for those of you who are interested. I'd recommend getting in fast as over 40k of the 60k ETH hardcap has already been sold to the whitelist participants. Seems to be heavy demand.
thanks for the updates....
upvoted...!!!
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STOPObrigado pelas informaçoes, gente que puder me seguir eu sigo de volta ;)
I agree with your criterias. I think that ICO's these days tend to launch on a daily basis without any real use in the real world. They are launched just to raise money, but will not likely reach the expected / projected target as a coin.
Indeed, there are ICO's with real life applications and this one seems like a good idea as the entertainment industry is constantly growing and events take place daily all around the globe.
I will keep an eye on this ICO as it has potential and will help event organizers and planners.
If you are going to get in then I would recommend having your finger over the button as soon as it opens. I can see it selling out in no time.
Will set a reminder :)
If it gets funded so fast, it means people trust them and also that they like where the project is heading.
https://blocktix.io/ isnt this the same thing, Im kind of getting over seeing ico after ico, clone after clone,
I've not come across this company before. Having just looked at their whitepaper and website in general, I wouldn't invest into this. Aventus as a whole are to me a much better unit. Having said that, there is another competitor to Aventus that will be focussing more on the US market called EventChain and they might be worth a look. The event management and ticketing solutions market is definitely big enough for more than one company.
Their is another ICO launching on the 13th of September called Eventchain. I plan to invest. https://eventchain.io/
EDIT: Eventchain has changed details of the whitepaper. No longer plan to invest.
@gnimeets What made you decide against it?
The minimum deposit for presale is 10 ETH. Just a bad decision that makes no sense. They have only raised 20 ETH in presale. I know its a new venture but too many details changed since I last checked it out and poor decision making right off the bat is not a good sign.
I've seen chatter online and it seems like it has quite a following. I might do a write up on it soon.
Nice set of research you have there. A couple of things is look at - who the other Blockchain based competetion is and what state the existing software is in. I know you haven't played with it yet but getting an idea of if it's alpha, beta and when it should be ready to rock and roll and with what features will help compare it to where the competition is.
Oh and also I look at any existing business relationships they have - like partners who will use them from day one, or seed round investors.
Keep up the good work - I'm definitely interested in this one now. I like ICOs that have a solid reason to exist and a good leg up to success.
Everything I've seen on the surface makes me think they are solid. Again though, I don't know the first things about programming so haven't been able to test the actual product itself... was kinda hoping some readers would have and fed back.
Looks solid. Great idea also. Do you have any prediction for it by the next 2 years?
It's just my opinion but I can see it being a multi-bagger for sure (unless some really crazy regulations come out against crypto). I'm going to guess it will be 3x it's opening price within 2 weeks. From there, who knows.
You have explained quite nicely but investment in ico is always a risk because of volatility and fraud.
The public ICO just got sold out in minutes, i didnt enter because some bug on MyEtherWallet, im pissed.
Thanks for the info
I had the same problem but was luckily on the whitelist for a half decent amount.
I missed the whitelist from that and kyber network