Interview with Aventus team:
What challenge is Aventus addressing?
Aventus is taking on the problem of counterfeiting and unregulated touting in the events tickets market. We are trying to build a more fair, secure, and transparent ticketing industry.
What is the scale of this challenge?
It is a very big challenge; we are attempting to re-build a very traditional and old industry that is highly monopolised. The monopolies do not want to give up their power, as its a giant market (over $20bn total) and they benefit from models that are unfavourable for many of the industry participants, like ticket buyers, artists, etc.
How does Aventus address these challenges?
We addressed the problem of unregulated touting by linking a form of ID to each ticket on the blockchain. Due to the immutable property of the blockchain, any ticket created after the fact by counterfeiters would not point to the appropriate identifier and thus be immediately flagged as a fake. Linking a ticket to an ID prevents it from being traded offline. On its own, however, this system does not fully solve the problems associated with unregulated touting.
If we stopped here, legitimate fans who couldn’t make it to an event would be left with no way to sell their ticket and recoup their money. For this we designed a secondary market with built-in price-controls, which uses the Aventus token (AVT) to facilitate matching ticket buyers with sellers. Since the blockchain is deterministic, we use matchers to allocate tickets in a pseudo-random manner.
The pseudo-randomness is important as it prevents any kind of foreknowledge as to who a ticket will be sold to, thus preventing people from selling tickets directly on the protocol and exchanging a further payment offline.
Can you showcase some team members/advisors which have a strong background? What is their connection with this particular project?
Alan Vey and Annika Monari, the two directors, both graduated from Imperial College London with first class honours in masters in artificial intelligence and particle physics respectively.
Alan did his masters thesis in blockchain film rights distribution (full paper here) with the director of the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering Centre at Imperial College, and Annika did hers at the CMS experiment at CERN in data driven particle detection. They are also full stack engineers for the project. Andy Grant, the head of product, has a very strong ticketing technology background as he has built ticketing infrastructure for the last decade, as the founder of GlueWorks and CTO/COO of TicketLogic, a ticketing company operating in 6 countries with over £6m in annual revenue.
Does Aventus have any strategic partnerships?
Yes. We have a strategic partnership with Blue Horizon Entertainment, a live entertainment startup based in the US headed up by 30+ year industry veterans working with the likes of Eric Clapton, Santana, Hard Rock, UFC, and Trump Towers.
We also have a client called Joy Records, a record company based in Tel Aviv, Israel. We will be doing the ticketing for their halloween event this October. We have a couple of other announcements coming soon.
Does Aventus have a viable product at this time?
Yes. We have an alpha product available for anyone to play with online at https://alpha.aventus.io, and we also have a client privately using a version of this product obfuscated by a server which handles all Ethereum account management on their behalf. An announcement about this will be coming soon.
What is the status or this product? (Alpha Beta or production)
The product is currently in an alpha stage.
How does Aventus compare to other similar projects such as Blocktix?
Aventus and Blocktix take different approaches. Blocktix aims to be a direct-to-consumer app that is tightly integrated with the blockchain. We, on the other hand, are making a platform, or ‘rail’, for the industry. Our approach allows for the de-siloing of the ticket industry. Anyone can tap into the Aventus protocol’s global pool of events and become a promoter, while blocktix sells only through their own app. Blocktix also only takes on the problem of counterfeiting, they do nothing to stop unregulated secondary market sales or black markets.
What is the structure of the ICO?
The Aventus token sale will run for 7 days from September 6th 2017 at 12:00 UTC until September 13th 2017 at 12:00 UTC. In order to make the process fair for both large and small investors, there will be a constant price of 92 AVT per ETH throughout this entire period. Participants will receive AVT immediately upon receipt of their payment, and it will become tradable at the end of the ICO on the 13th.
What are the requirements to participate in the ICO?
We are currently waiting to find out if we can accept US contributions, but otherwise there are no requirements for participation.
What are the advantages of holding AVT?
AVT is the fuel of the Aventus protocol. Token holders can earn AVT rewards through voting on event legitimacy, application legitimacy, and system parameters. These rewards are weighted more heavily for correct votes. You can also participate in matching, which is the non deterministic matching of buyers and sellers in the secondary market, to earn tokens. These methods allow you to gain AVT by providing useful functions in the system, e.g. facilitating the secondary market and identifying fraud in the protocol. Users will also have the option to purchase tickets directly in AVT.
Was there a pre-ico?
There was a pre-ico, which was reserved for clients and strategic partners.
What is the price of the pre-ico and the price of the ico?
AVT will be priced at 92 AVT per ETH throughout the public crowd-sale. The pre-sale was discounted from this amount up to a maximum of 20%.
How many tokens will be issued and how will they be allocated?
The maximum total token supply is 10,000,000 AVT. Of this, 6,000,000 AVT will be sold in the crowd sale. 1,950,000 AVT will be distributed as new user incentives over the next few years. These incentives will go to strategic partners and applications that build upon the Aventus protocol, as well as event organisers and promoters. 2.5% of the total supply will go to our bounties campaign. The remaining 18% (1,800,000 AVT) will be distributed to the Aventus team, advisors, and corporate sponsors. Of this 15.5% of the total supply (1,550,000 AVT) will be locked in for a year.
Is there a cap on the ICO?
We have a hard cap of 60,000 ETH raised.
Would you like to add any further info?
For more information people should go to our website, http://aventus.io, and check out our blog; we release content multiple time a week.
We thank the Aventus team for the interview.
