Case Study: FIFA Tickets

Abstract: International sports company based in China, Shankai Sports, leveraged blockchain technology in 2018 to optimize the sales, distribution, and fulfilment of FIFA World Cup 2018 VIP tickets.

Background

With ticket tokenization, Shankai Sports aims to make the ticket sales more secure and cost-efficient by eliminating ticket fraud. The long term vision of the company is to open up a secondary market for tickets which will make the ticket more valuable to the holder of the ticket. By ensuring that the new digital tickets are more valuable and easily adopted by a common consumer, Shankai sports seeks to attract more buyers of their digital tickets.

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To achieve this goal, Shankai sports partnered with AlphaWallet to issue ticket tokens for FIFA-2018. This was the first time tickets of an international sporting event of this stature used blockchain technology for the distribution and redemption of tickets. 

The Pain Points

Today, the ticketing industry suffers from the following key pain points:

• Cumbersome and complex process of printing and distributing physical tickets. 
• Multiple sales and distribution channels of tickets 
• Un-regulated secondary market and fraud around the tickets
• The price of the tickets fluctuates and none of the additional value created goes back to the organisers of the event

Sports companies such as Shankai sports rely heavily on different solutions, including paper processes, to track and distribute tickets. Digitising tickets would take away most of the costs associated with distribution and verification of the tickets.

The Solution

To efficiently distribute the tickets and make the crypto tickets user friendly, Shankai sports would either build a dedicated app or create a DApp website with sophisticated logic. 

In contrast to this traditional approach, AlphaWallet helped Shankai sports to create ticket attestation/NFT and its associated tokenscript. The tokenscript functions made the NFT acquire unique functions of a ticket in any TokenScript supported crypto wallets. The ticket holder was able to redeem the digital ticket to enter the event premises at the time of the event. The user was also able to transfer or sell the tickets to other wallet holders.

The tokens were also able to leverage the MagicLink feature in AlphaWallet that allowed the user to sell the token to anyone by sharing a URL, without the need of knowing any information about the receiver. The first person who would access the link can buy the token into their crypto wallet.

Tickets would be the killer app of blockchain that will drive token adoption in the broader market. Since 2018, we kept developing our technology. We are one of the most innovated technology providers for the ticketing industry. 

Victor Zhang, AlphaWallet CEO