I’m inspired to write after seeing another LinkedIN post talking about NFTs and the future for the world of attractions. It's this kind of theorising about the application of technology that led to the founding of Crowd Convert.
I’ll start with some basics
A non fungible token - from Wikipedia “A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain and is used to certify ownership and authenticity. It cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the blockchain and can be transferred by the owner, allowing NFTs to be sold and traded.”
So in the ticketing world an NFT could be embedded or associated with a ticket to confirm ownership of that ticket - all good so far.
First - do we need it? How much of an issue is the fraudulent exchange and distribution of tickets? I can understand in the world of live entertainment, big name concerts and sporting events where tickets can change hands for many times face value - does the world of attractions have these issues?
There’s also the benefit of confirming uniqueness or authenticity. Take a Banksy artwork or Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, is there really a case for proving your ownership of a ticket after the event in a kind of digital scrapbook?
There are a couple of rather significant drawbacks from generating an NFT for each sale
First is speed - everywhere I’ve seen these being used there is a significant delay in production of the ticket. At one venue this was so bad that the staff had taken to pre printing a load of tickets at the start of the day and issuing these by hand rather than wait for the system to produce one. So in this case any potential benefits of associating the ticket to the owner were lost, adding a huge overhead to the front desk team.
Next is cost both financial and environmental. There are various estimates about the cost of production which varies depending upon the method and ongoing tracking. The lowest I’ve seen is pennies per NFT going up to a few pounds. The cost comes from the amount of energy needed to produce each NFT which leads to the environmental impact which runs into many kilograms of C02 for each one.
So do we really need NFTs in the world of attraction ticketing? Take this back to one of the founding principals behind Crowd Convert - what benefits do they add to the guest. I can’t answer that question for every venue, it really is down to the attraction operators to do that. Does the benefit to the guest outweigh any delay and cost? At this point I really don’t see that they do but I’m willing to be persuaded, after all there are some uses for chocolate teapots somewhere, aren’t there?