Verifiable Digital Ticketing
Admission credentials that can prove their own provenance, carry transfer policy with them, and give the issuer visibility of every movement between sale and turnstile.
This is the practice area the firm was built around. A ticket is a bearer instrument: whoever holds a valid one gets in. That was a workable model when a stub was a physical object, and it became a problem the moment admission moved to a barcode that can be copied an unlimited number of times without degrading.
The industry’s answer was to hide the barcode. Rotating codes inside a closed app make a screenshot useless, and that genuinely reduced gate fraud. But it solved a copying problem with an app-distribution problem, and it did nothing about the deeper issue: at the moment a ticket changes hands, the issuer usually loses the record.
What “verifiable” means here
A verifiable credential is a signed statement whose authenticity can be checked without calling back to the issuer’s database. In ticketing that means an admission right cryptographically bound to two things: the issuer, so a forged credential fails verification rather than failing at the gate; and the holder, so the right can be checked against an identity or a device at the point of entry. The W3C Verifiable Credentials data model is the sensible starting point, and the companies we take seriously use it or something structurally equivalent rather than inventing a proprietary format.
The distributed ledger, where one is used, is not the interesting part. It is a shared, tamper-evident record of issuance and transfer that several parties who do not fully trust each other can rely on — the club, the promoter, the resale marketplace, the payment processor. If a company’s pitch spends more time on the chain than on the settlement flow, that is usually a sign the product was designed to be a token rather than a ticket.
We invest in ticketing infrastructure. We do not invest in speculative token issuance, in collectible mints attached to events, or in anything whose economics depend on a secondary asset appreciating rather than on a service someone pays for.
Transfer policy is the product
Once a credential can carry policy, the rights-holder can express things it has always wanted and never been able to enforce: this seat may be transferred once, to a verified person, at or below face value, until forty-eight hours before kick-off, with the identity check preserved. Season-ticket holders can lend seats to a named list without the club losing sight of who walks in. A cup allocation can be restricted to the away support it was intended for.
Every one of those rules is a commercial decision, not a technical one, which is why the companies that win here are the ones whose product lets a ticketing director configure policy without a change request. We spend a lot of diligence time on the policy engine and on how it degrades: what happens when the network at a stand goes down, when a phone is flat, when a fan arrives with a printout because that is what they have always done.
Where the money is
Three places. Fraud reduction, which is real but bounded, and which we treat as the reason a buyer takes the first meeting rather than the reason they renew. Transfer economics, where a rights-holder that can see and govern resale converts leakage into a channel it participates in. And the fan record, which is the durable asset: when a credential survives transfer with consent attached, the club knows who actually attended, and everything downstream — hospitality upsell, sponsorship measurement, safety planning, dynamic pricing — gets better inputs.
What we look for
- A live gate Companies that have processed real entry at a real venue on a real match day. Access control is unforgiving, and simulation proves nothing.
- Offline behaviour A defensible answer for verification when connectivity fails, because it will.
- Interoperability Wallet support and clean integration with incumbent ticketing systems. Rights-holders rarely rip and replace; they wrap.
- A settlement story Who holds funds during a transfer, how chargebacks are handled, and what the rights-holder is owed when a seat moves.
- Regulatory literacy Resale legislation differs sharply between jurisdictions, and a product that assumes one market’s rules will not travel.
Where we lead in this area we expect a board seat, because the commercial decisions — which rights-holder to sign first, whether to build a marketplace or stay infrastructure — compound faster here than anywhere else in the portfolio.
Building in verifiable digital ticketing?
Tell us what you have shipped, who is paying for it and what you are raising. We read everything ourselves and answer with a written reason either way.