Blocklive and Inco Working Together To Bring Confidentiality to Onchain Ticketing

Events infrastructure stands to make significant gains as a result of being brought onchain, with companies and event attendees both in line to benefit from increased efficiency. By executing ticketing in the onchain economy, companies can verify ticket ownership and reduce fraud and scalping, and consumers can benefit from the cost efficiencies made by reducing middlemen. With the size of the global events market projected to grow to a huge $3274.6 Billion by 2033.

However, blockchains are inherently public, meaning all transactions can be seen by anyone with an Internet connection. If you buy a ticket to an event onchain, everyone could see which events you’re attending, how much you bought each ticket for, and even where you’re seated—introducing a host of privacy concerns for attendees. Performers, meanwhile, want to keep proprietary data around their audience and tour confidential. 

The challenge is to bring the events industry onchain without sacrificing the privacy-by-default afforded by legacy Web2 platforms. Such a solution would maintain the benefits of onchain ticketing, with app developers able to leverage the composability blockchains offered, while offering consumers and companies the confidentiality they’ve come to expect from current solutions. 

With this in mind, Inco is collaborating with Web3 events platform Blocklive to bring confidentiality to onchain ticketing.

The Inco protocol leverages advanced encryption technologies including Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to bring confidentiality to public blockchains. FHE enables onchain data to be made confidential while still allowing computation upon it, meaning developers can build advanced applications without leaking the data. This could be used for applications such as verifying someone has a ticket to a specific event without showing how much they paid for it, selectively revealing their seat placing to fellow attendees or staff, or issuing perks to specific ticket holders without this information being displayed publicly. Event organizers could also avoid the “empty room” problem, where anyone can see how many tickets are available and how many have been sold, which can create adverse incentives for attendees.

Blocklive’s mission is to put the live entertainment industry onchain, enabling event producers to control their ticket sales and create consumer journeys on blockchains with Acts, Points, and Exclusive Drops. Blocklive is already making onchain ticketing a reality, serving both crypto-native events and programming for a general audience such as music festivals and sports. 

Blocklive CEO Paul Warren said: “The privacy and security enabled by Inco’s confidentiality layer is a crucial component of enterprise adoption in blockchain-based primary ticketing. By obfuscating primary volumes, producers can safely accept low-fee, low-chargeback payments in stablecoins and avoid the “empty room” effect at the beginning of a public sale. Future iterations might unlock blind bidding experiences used for clearing unused inventory and permissioned auditing experiences to meet regional regulations.”

Inco CEO Remi Gai said: “Ticketing is a fantastic use case for the onchain ecosystem, but it needs confidentiality in order to achieve the usability that consumers are used to from Web2. Now, using Blocklive, attendees can keep their details, such as the amount they paid and where they’re seated, private. This makes onchain ticketing a lot more practical.”