Editor’s Note: This is an op-ed from Stanible founder Harry Santos on the trials and tribulations of onboarding the general public and making them aware of NFTs and blockchain technology. This is Stanible’s foray into online ticketing — using NFTs as concert tickets. Stanible is an app that allows fans (or stans) to own a digital collectibles made by your favorite content creators. Think of it like Instagram, but you can ‘own’ and trade their actual posts.
As an NFT marketplace for creators and their fans, NFT ticketing has always been on our future roadmap but business targets forced us to work on it just a few months after our launch. We already had about 20,000 downloads but downloads alone are not enough. We learned not enough people will be into “buying jpegs” if there’s no attached “utility” or perks. Of course, there’s no better perk for fans than to actually get to watch their favorite musicians perform live.
Each NFT is unique and therefore it was easy enough for our developers to attach a unique QR code to each one that can serve as an event ticket. Event ticketing seems to be an obvious and natural use case for NFTs.
We also found out that many bands were still using manual payments for many of their gigs and concerts and there’s still much needed adoption of a seamless digitized ticketing service when it comes to many independent event organizers in the country.
Our CEO, Mel-Lozano Alcaraz, is married to rockstar Mong Alcaraz, who’s the guitarist of bands Chicosci and Sandwich, so we already had our foot in the door. In less than a month of planning, we had an opportunity to pilot our NFT ticketing service during the Chicosci Summer Party where big musicians like Rico Blanco and Zild Benitez were also set to perform.
After that first event, we wanted to scale and think bigger, and so in just a few weeks, we partnered with Kamikazee to co-present Roadkill 2023, a concert with some of the country’s biggest bands including Urbandub, Mayonnaise, Dilaw, Moonstar88, and many others.
Since then our goal has been to expand to events outside of rock and roll partnering with the likes of drag queens, k-pop fan events, and other genres.
NFT-gated events, aside from adding a seamless and more secure digital process to ticketing, also enhances the fan experience by allowing fans to have a permanent keepsake that they actually own. Event tickets no longer have to be one-time and transactional as this also opens opportunities for event organizers to re-engage attendees for future community-building activities.
We believe NFT ticketing and concerts are just a gateway towards bigger web3 adoption especially as we build more features that integrate web3 elements in enhancing the fan experience.