Sports Illustrated Embraces Ethereum for NFT Event Tickets

Sports Illustrated today announced Box Office, a new NFT ticketing platform built on Polygon, an Ethereum scaling network. The move marks the major sports brand’s entry into primary ticketing alongside secondary marketplace SI Tickets which launched in 2021.

Box Office is now part of SI tickets, the online marketplace that resells tickets to major events across sports, concerts and theater. Instead of catering to the biggest events in sports and music, Box Office accepts ticket listings from smaller community events that might otherwise appear on ticketing sites like Eventbrite or DICE.

“We’re not here to compete against Ticketmaster, SeatGeek or AXS. We’re going after the event self-service market,” said SI Tickets CEO David Lane Decrypt.

“We’re trying to create the first mass market adoption of NFT tickets,” he continued, “so that anyone from a 15-year-old to a 90-year-old can buy their first NFT ticket without having to go through a crypto tutorial on the blockchain, or have to get a wallet and understand all aspects of it.”

Box Office was built with Ethereum software studio ConsenSys.

Box Office’s NFT tickets will be found in the SI Tickets mobile app. In addition to providing admission, event organizers can also outfit tickets with content such as photo and video highlights, collectibles, personalized messages, promotional offers and loyalty rewards to engage with fans. Content can be recorded and uploaded before, during and after an event.

For example, tickets to an upcoming youth football game in Texas — set to seat up to 2,000 fans — will be listed at the box office. In addition to youth sports, the Box Office expects to list both free and paid tickets from partners with music venues, nightclubs, business conferences, private parties, fitness and yoga studios, comedy clubs, religious retreats and charity events.

“As the global economy continues to recover from the pandemic, we expect live events, concerts and sporting events to regain their pre-pandemic popularity,” Johnna Powell, global co-head of ConsenSys NFTsaid in a statement to Decrypt. “The combination of these factors suggests that consumer demand for NFT event tickets will increase in the coming years.”

Lane claims SI’s Box Office has a 20% lower fee structure than Eventbrite. Fans can also transfer their tickets to NFT marketplaces and other secondary ticketing platforms such as Vivid Seats, SeatGeek and Stubhub to resell their Box Office NFT tickets.

Sports Illustrated offers a 50-50 revenue split on resale with event organizers and artists, and will do so by tracking the chain data of box office transactions.

“You always get paid when your ticket is sold, but you don’t participate in reselling it on the secondary market — but that’s what changes here,” Lane said.

“We share 50-50 with our partners. They will get 50% of the resale proceeds, he added. “For the events that have resale value, this is one of the big advantages of NFT tickets. That’s why I really believe this will be the standard going forward.”

Users who purchase a ticket at Box Office will also receive a $10 bonus for purchasing tickets to any of the 250,000 major events listed on SI Tickets’ secondary marketplace, whose A-list events will appear alongside Box Office events in the same app.

“Your event is going to be listed on our website next to the biggest sporting, concert and theater events in the area,” Lane said. “[Organizers] is no longer relegated to an Eventbrite-type hyperlocal landing page. You are literally with Taylor Swift, Billy Joel and the Knicks. It gives great visibility to any event that wants to work with us.”

NFL has offered free virtual memory card NFT ticket stubs on Ticketmaster since 2021 for fans who have purchased traditional tickets to attend games, while MLB’s partnership with Candy Digital also includes commemorative tickets for NFT. Ticketmaster introduced an Ethereum NFT token gating feature in March for artists to give their NFT-holding fans early access to tickets.

“[Box Office] is really about mass adoption of NFT tickets — not novelty, niche, limited quantities,” Lane said. – This is something everyone can use. This applies to all types of events. We expect this to be the entry point for millions to be able to enter the blockchain and get their first NFT ticket.”