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GET Protocol's 2022 Roadmap

Laying out our ambitions for 2022

Our roadmap is also available in video format.

Laying out the Product, Token, and Community strategy for a desirable GET Protocol in 2022.

Where 2021 was the year of scaling, 2022 will be about creating the most desirable offering for all participants of the protocol, whether it be for integrators, event organisers, NFT owners, or community members.

Before we start to look at what is coming up this year it’s worth taking stock of where we are right now and what is on our immediate horizon. We won't be diving too much into the white-label product roadmap in this article but a great deal of progress is being made here. More than you may expect and what you see here will only be the tip of the iceberg for the white-label. Technical scalings continue well and a whole host of feature advancements are planned for release. We work closely with integrators to hone the feature set of the white-label, but for now we'll be diving more into the more blockchain-relevant components.

Closing the Chapter on Scaling

After a highly successful 2021 for the protocol we’re ready to shift gears on our approach. The concept of scaling never truly ends and you always need to keep an eye on your operational processes, hiring pipelines, and technical metrics. But thanks to the efforts of recent months we’re in a position to make scaling more of a ‘background task’ rather than our primary focus.

To start with the technical side of things within the coming weeks we’ll be releasing a redesigned version of our NFT smart contracts that includes custom batching techniques made specifically to optimise throughput of our NFT Tickets. Not only will we be able to mint at a much greater scale but we also anticipate that the minting costs of each NFT will come down dramatically. Our current estimates place this at approximately a 50x increase in throughput and a 6x reduction in minting costs. This is no mean feat and we’re talking about much more than 20% incremental improvements with this release, making it likely that we will soon be one of the most efficient NFT minters out there. On top of this we’ve restructured the data storage on-chain so that each event is its own contract. This brings huge benefits to the integrators and event organisers allowing them to custom brand their own third party marketplace collections and ensure that these only contain NFTs relevant to their event.

The organisation continues to scale from strength to strength recently hiring a new CEO for GUTS to allow the in-house ticketing arm of the organisation to grow with the right focus in 2022 and continual successful hiring within Engineering and Product roles gives us the capacity to execute on our ambitions.

The Road Ahead for 2022

A quick note on roadmaps; beware the teams that say they know exactly what they’ll be working on 12 months from now. The blockchain space moves faster than any other and attempting to lay out every work item that far in advance would mostly be wasted effort, so how does it work? We identify the main drivers of value that we see in front of us and try and match our ambitions to our ability to deliver on them. We have a good grasp of what provides the most value to the customers so we start there and accept some flexility for the features further down the road. Things will undoubtedly be re-prioritised for the shifting sands of the real world but that doesn’t stop us from laying it out as we see it and guiding you through the direction ahead.

Where 2021 was scalability, 2022 will be desirability.

We’ll be doing this using three drivers:

  • To give value to the NFTs. Ticket buyers will own collectibles that they want to trade and additional value adds that take the NFT beyond just being a memento.

  • Opening new revenue streams for the integrators and the protocol.

  • Making the token work for itself through advanced treasury management patterns and positive feedback loops.

This is delivered by doing what we do best, being a protocol. Here we’ll be building the tools that other ticketing companies can use to best meet their workflow needs and that will be a common theme throughout. Put the customer first and the rest will follow.

Custom NFTs

One area that we’re keen to advance is our ability to handle custom NFT workflows that enable scarcity, additional metadata, and content differences between the artwork of each NFT. As it happens our API can already handle different content per NFT Ticket so now we’ll be upgrading our tooling to help Event Organisers and Artists have full control over the NFT sets that they wish to produce without diving into API integrations.

From our most NFT-savvy customers we’re coming to expect that they want easier ways of managing these workflows and the upcoming release of the Integrator Dashboard will give us the foundation in place to offer these power-users better control over the NFT content. Coupled with an independent smart contract per-event we’re left with a powerful NFT rarity system that can be leveraged by organisers to build hype and excitement around their NFTs.

Fan Engagement

One thing we’re hearing from artists time and again is that they wish to be able to foster communities of dedicated fans and the NFT tickets are a perfect application of this. The hard work is done and an NFT has already been minted for every attendee and now we’ll start to use this to ensure that organisers can use the NFTs for community building and further engagement.

A couple of practical and immediate examples to this would be allowing access to a particular Discord server if a user has the NFT ticket in their wallet, or even offering governance-style votes on what fans want to happen at a particular event by using the NFTs within a governance platform such as Snapshot. These tools enable artists to build a deeper and more direct line to their fans, which furthers the desirability of product. We are looking forward to seeing these use cases come to life and believe they’ll inspire other event organisers.

NFT Trading Royalties

An obvious next step is for us to start to define royalty splits per-event to allow the artists to capture a perpetual revenue stream from the event. Not only does this create a great sales pitch (‘the NFTs can pay for themselves’) but more importantly incentivises the right behaviours for NFT curation on the protocol. Having that royalty sharing back to the artist gives a powerful incentive to make and market the most valuable NFTs possible because there would now be a direct reward for doing so.

Royalty percentages aren’t needed or desired for all events however and we’ll continue to use the Integrator Dashboard as the home for organisers to be able to configure the desired royalty per-event.

Event Financing

We’ll be introducing a new financial primitive for our Integrators to have extra liquidity available to power their loan operations. We’ve done a lot of work on this front and are getting closer to having a set of smart contracts ready to attempt to run some pilots with on a production blockchain network. It is a product that can change an industry and one that needs to be continually refined in the early stages to find the right product-market fit so to set expectations, we’ll first make this available to integrators to learn and adapt before we’re in a position to build something resembling ‘a vault that I can invest in’. We’re going to continually head towards this level of accessibility and we’re guaranteed to learn a lot from any initial trials.

Leveraging the infrastructure of the integrators here is the best path to market as they already have the ability to set agreements with organisers and have the operational capacity and relationships to handle the risk assessments and support needed. We’re there to make sure they have financing available to support these operations and this will be handled all on-chain, with the NFTs held as collateral.

For those interesting in learning more about the general concepts behind this, take a look into Debt Financing for some more depth. More will follow as we firm up on the first pilots.

Branded Marketplaces

To give you an idea of some of the projects we may be looking at later this year, it’s worth highlighting Branded Marketplaces as one of these possibilities. We’re still exploring this and trying to find out how best to fit this one into the product offering, but there are some interesting opportunities that it enables and we want to not only show you what we’re planning on working on but also what we’re exploring.

Having a custom marketplace allows us greater control of the user experience and journeys, which becomes crucial for facilitating secondary market on-chain transfers. There are many practical (and sometimes legal) reasons that the event organisers need to collect some information about the attendee and collecting that information prior to an on-chain transfer will be crucial to ensure the Event Organiser experience is the best it can be. Allowing this to be a branded allows for a continuation of the white-label package from only being a ticketing platform to also covering the entire NFT lifecycle.

But to be clear; this one is still in discovery and we need to learn a lot more about the shape of it and the best way to introduce it to the market and when we have that we’ll be in a great position to kick it off.

Protocol Owned Liquidity

Liquidity for the protocol should be considered to be a fundamental part of the system and not just an external benefit for the token. It would never be an acceptable thing to turn away an integrator that day because there wasn’t enough liquidity for them to invest in the protocol, or too much slippage to make fuelling the events impractical. The permanent and most practical solution to this is to have the protocol own its own liquidity that would be instantly deployable to where the system requires it and always available to the market. Not only will this liquidity grow organically over time due to earning trading fees further capturing GET from the market but will remain a dependable part of the NFT ticketing system for the long haul.

We’re currently in conversation with partners that can help facilitate acquiring this liquidity and are looking forward to going into more depth soon.

Perpetual Treasury

Deploying the GET Protocol treasuries is challenging. On one hand we have healthy reserves of the token available for advancement of the protocol but utilising this likely means selling GET. Selling reduces the price and therefore market cap so future GET within the treasury becomes less valuable and even less deployable. Naturally, this can stir up damaging narratives and it doesn’t take a lot for a reasonable sale to turn into “the foundation is dumping GET”. We can do better and need to plan in advance to avoid this.

Keeping token inflation in-check is something that is important to not only to the community but to all of us, no new GET can ever be minted and we need to be smart about how we use the GET we have. As a result of this we’re looking into a net-zero inflation machanism to perpetually offer GET to the market and use this to build a non-GET basket of digital assets that can then be deployed without having to sell GET onto the market. By ensuring that these assets are yield-bearing we can then use this yield to buy-back the GET that was originally offered, returning the treasury to where it started. Then, if we wish, we can do it all over again and the treasury generation never needs to end. This is the beauty of the system and we can perpetually build up and diversify the treasury that backs GET Protocol.

While the specifics of the mechanism are still in the works we believe that it’ll be feasible to bootstrap this through offerings to both the integrators and the community by ensuring limits on the amount offered to allow this to blend into regular volume and without a market sale. A broad treasury invested in productive assets will do a world of good for additional passive revenue streams and we may just have found our pathway to doing so.

The concept is well explained in ‘A New Mental Model for Defi Treasuries’ in which it lays out a strategy for broader and more advanced treasury management and is worth a read for reference.

Staking

As we start to build up an ecosystem of treasury and token features incentivising all parties for a common goal becomes crucial. We have an active ecosystem of different parties all contributing to the protocol in some way; community members, integrators, event organisers, ticket buyers, and a well designed staking strategy allows us to turn all participants into active contributors with a longer term horizon for the protocol. Future DAO participants can be self-selected for honest & quality participation due to skin in the game, integrators can be incentivised to buy and hold via staking benefits, ticket buyers could be incentivised to stake for additional NFT content. Not all of this is nailed down but the potential is there to enhance the community and ecosystem at large and our initial explorations give a lot of confidence that this can be a sustainable model for the long run.

We’ve taken the time to evaluate a number of possible strategies and are converging on something that makes a lot of sense for the needs of the protocol and bringing this to light will be a key focus for the roadmap this year.

Community Involvement

Community is the cornerstone of Web3 and for GET Protocol it’s no different. It is the vibrant activity undertaken by our community that continues to be the backbone for upholding the protocol’s ethos of becoming a standard that benefits everyday people around the world.

At the same time the community acts as a finely balanced litmus test for generating new ideas and reaching out into the wider space to procure new leads and outreach.

We’re incredibly grateful to have so many amazing members that make our community unique and in 2022 we are putting the theme of desirability to work, by giving the community greater opportunities to immerse and participate in protocol activities whilst having a better support structure in place to generate a tailwind for community initiatives.

Immersion

Complete immersion can only be achieved when there’s equal opportunities to experience every side of a product or system. For the protocol that means being able to see a complete picture of the systems at play, be that ticketing volume, ticketing integrators, event organisers, artists, individual NFTs, Web3 connection opportunities, the list goes on.

So far, we’ve been painting the broader strokes, giving an overlook of total statistics, be that ticketing volume, $GET fuelling usage and activity at scale, but it’s now time to shine a light on the finer side of what we’re achieving.

After all, it is the finer, more innately human role a ticket performs that makes it unique. The most important goal of a ticket is to provide the holder a guaranteed and safe passage into a shared human experience, everything else is a nicety. When the opportunity comes knocking to build upon this primary role of providing passage into experiences, you’re adding value to the core objective of the ticket.

As we’ve spoke about at length over the last few months, NFT tickets are redefining ticketing by providing a lasting connection between fans and artists, a passage that never needs to end.

And since this underpins the objectives of GET Protocol, it stands to reason that it’s becoming more important for us to also give the community and wider space a taste of these new experiences, showcasing clear examples of how GET Protocol’s NFT tickets are benefiting everyday people around the world.

So how will we achieve this?

We’ll be introducing more ‘touch points’ for community members to interact with that showcase the unlocked experiences provided by our NFT ticketing. This will cover visual design, fan engagement and reward mechanisms at play and the continuation of the event connection for specific event organisers and artists.

You can expect these touch points to be spread across our social platforms such as Discord and Twitter, our existing platforms such as the NFT Ticket Explorer and some new possibilities...

Participation

We’ll be getting underway with what we’re entitling a ‘Minimum Viable DAO’ in 2022, opening the door for the community to have a greater say in community activity and growth, fostering a greater sense of collective building and ownership.

Like we’ve communicated in the past, we’ll be clear that the process towards complete protocol governance via DAO is a long journey, one that will take the culmination of several steps both from an internal and community education standpoint, but also to ensure systems can become fully permissionless to support such a rigorously decentralised structure.

But that should be understandable considering the sheer scale and complexity of a ticketing protocol being used by real businesses for events that need to keep ticketing operations smooth at all times. Clients and their customer base cannot be provided with a Web3 excuse as to why products or systems go offline, and with our grounded approach, we will take our time to ensure the transition goes as intended on a secure timeframe.

That being said, there are opportunities aplenty for heading in the right direction, by giving the community ownership over community growth, outreach possibilities and a number of voting factors.

As we head towards an MVD, stay tuned for more information on how this will play out.

Support

In par with increased ownership opportunities, comes the need for support structures that provide a tailwind to keep smooth sailing. This will come in the form of developer and community grants that not only help community members envision and embark on building valuable tooling and community services that add padding to the protocol’s infrastructure, but also attract new members to the community with the talent necessary to take the DAO to new heights.

There are many incredibly gifted and passionate builders and creatives in the Web3 world, and the protocol needs to provide the key ingredients to attract their attention. 2022 will be the year for setting this in motion and we’re looking forward to revealing more when the time is right.

White-Label Symbiosis

Symbiosis

A weird word on paper, but an aptly suited one to describe the relationship that the protocol is building with its ticketing integrators. There is a shared spirit amongst us and the protocol’s latest white-labellers, to redefine ticketing together and push the envelop of NFT discovery.

As you can imagine this is very exciting, not only for furthering the mindshare of what an NFT ticket can unlock, but cementing GET Protocol as a platform that gives integrators the foundation to accentuate their wildest ideas for fostering a better connection within the events industry.

Over 2022, we expect this to continue, with white-labellers becoming more active participants, generating ticket volume, pursuing NFT use cases, sharing in outreach and building upon the protocol.

It would not be complete without mentioning GET Protocol’s latest white-labeller, Relic Tickets that have started the year with an incredible energy for providing education and use case discovery of NFT ticketing to their clients. We know for certain that you’ll want to keep an eye on them throughout 2022 and we recommend staying tuned for a Twitter Spaces AMA with two of Relic’s founders, Hunter and Kwaku next week!

The GET Protocol Foundation

Since 2016 we have been building ticketing infrastructure powered by the latest technology to upgrade the experience for all in the ticketing chain.

Ticketing companies of all sizes use our infrastructure to get clearer insights, generate greater revenue and maximise the connection through their tickets.

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A parting note

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