Front Row is a decentralised ticket marketplace hosted on the Internet Computer blockchain. Our Mission is to partner with event organisers across the IC ecosystem and revolutionise the customer experience in the entertainment industry!
Front Row is a web3 alternative to Ticketmaster. The current biggest platform for ticket sales is TicketMaster which has received severe backlash as the tickets available on the platform are seen to be overpriced and inaccessible. This is mainly due to TicketMaster reportedly holding back up to 90% of the tickets for the second-hand market. The scarcity of first-release tickets coupled with the fact that the available tickets are often bought out by computerised Bots leads to all the tickets being overpriced and unavailable to the vast majority of individuals.
Front Row allows for the use of Non-Fungible Tokens as tickets for events across the ICP ecosystem. An alternative to the traditional Ticketmaster platform, Front Row creates a trustworthy and tamper-proof marketplace for the second-hand sale of tickets. Should the original ticket buyer not be able to attend the event, the platform will offer a trustworthy and tamper-proof marketplace for him to be able to sell his ticket to another prospective buyer.
The platform is perfectly suited to address all of these issues and improve the ticketing industry. Firstly, Front Row will release 100% of the available tickets in the first release, increasing the number of available tickets and making them affordable to a wider audience. Secondly, blockchain technology allows us to limit the number of tickets individuals can purchase for each event. This will be achieved by limiting the number of Non-Fungible Tokens (tickets) per wallet which will prevent even the most efficient bots from purchasing the majority of the first release tickets and selling them at a higher price. Finally, Front Row will provide a trustworthy tamper-proof marketplace for the second-hand sale of tickets which will be executed through peer-to-peer transactions. All the tickets listed on the Front Row marketplace will be authentic and impossible to counterfeit.
Ticket reselling is a large growing industry with a global market size of $2.6 billion in 2022 and a projected increase to $5.9 billion by 2031 which represents an annual growth rate of 9.7% between 2023 and 2031. Despite the growth of this market it continues to experience many instances of fraudulent activity with secondary sellers selling counterfeit tickets. These counterfeit tickets are estimated to represent 10% of all global tickets and affect up to 11 million US citizens each year.
Why the IC?
The IC blockchain provides the perfect framework for hosting Front Row. Due to its complete decentralisation, the IC is able to provide very low Gas Fees due to its reverse gas model. This essentially means that rather than the user having to face the cost of validating the transaction on the blockchain, it is up to the platform (Front Row) to pay for the canister cycles necessary to complete and record the blockchain transaction.
As the prices of the available NFT tickets are expected to be reasonably low, we thought it imperative to maintain low gas fees for the end user as we feel individuals should not be paying a much higher cost than the price of an individual ticket. Furthermore, the Internet Computer blockchain is one of the fastest available blockchains with a processing speed of approximately 11,500 transactions per second. This will allow Front Row to be a reliable platform even when the demand for first-hand tickets is high and many individuals are attempting to purchase tickets at the same time.
Our Roadmap
Front Row plans to launch in December 2023 and onboard our first events for the start of 2024. The first onboarded events will be focused on the ICP ecosystem, however, the platform plans to expand to other blockchains by accepting new forms of payment such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. This should help the platform grow rapidly and bring more attention to the capabilities of the ICP blockchain.
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