Part 2 — NFT Marketplace Deployer to Xircus Web3 Protocol

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Welcome to part 2 of the explanation “Deployer to Xircus Web3 protocol”. In this part, we will cover the remaining phases of our philosophy and explain our protocol through an easy-to-understand and recognizable business use case.

Missed part 1? You can read ‘Part 1’ by clicking on this link

Phase 3: Modularization

Growing an app and adding must-see features are time-consuming and cost-expensive endeavors for marketplace owners. Here at Xircus, we created modular components like Lego blocks that can be installed in any NFT marketplace. These modules or components are micro applications that owners can plug into the marketplace where users can participate either by doing an activity or running a certain transaction to receive rewards or make the marketplace less boring.

Phase 4: Accessibility

The promise of blockchain is a trust-less and transparent immutable database and thus NFTs need to be visible and accessible on different devices such as browser applications, mobile devices, and smart TVs. Making NFTs accessible to any of these devices gives confidence to the creators and collectors to effortlessly track their NFT holdings either for bragging rights, net worth showcase or just collecting personally for fun.

Firstly let’s take a look on a pragmatic product level at how nowadays problems occur, followed by a use case.

Infrastructural problems
All NFT creators need a marketplace to sell their NFTs, whether you are a brand, an individual art seller, or a music artist. There are currently two ways to achieve this:

by listing the NFT on a marketplace like Opensea, Rarible, Foundation etc.
by developing and launching an own NFT marketplace

Here’s why these two conventional methods are a problem. Let’s start with the first one ‘by listing the NFT on a marketplace like OpenSea, Rarible, Foundation etc.:

Cuts a hole in the pocket: The costs to sell an NFT through a marketplace is exorbitant. To get NFTs listed, you have to shell a significant percentage — then there’s a commission on the sale.
No control: NFT marketplaces have their own terms and conditions. They even control the price, the number of visitors and the positioning of your NFT on the marketplace. Imagine your token on a big marketplace gets lost in a sea of other tokens. You cannot have custom features. You have to play by the rules that are not meant for your benefit.
Zero Connections Or Opportunities: Once you list your tokens, all you can do is wait for someone to buy them on the marketplace. You do not have any “real means” to promote yourself on the platform — and such promotions are again very costly. Also, you are not able to connect to other sellers.
Royalty Fees: On average, existing marketplaces allow up to 10% royalty fee for creators. Xircus provides flexible royalty for creators and they can get up to 15% share, and collectors can receive from 1% redistributed royalty shares after the third sale.
Commission: Existing NFT marketplaces charge up to a whopping 35% of first sales. That makes it difficult for new creators and DAPPS to enter the market. Xircus eliminates this middlemen fee. We don’t have any commission on sales, only minimal transaction fees between 2.5% and up to 5%. The problem here is a successful selling strategy would require to get fans to sign up on a third-party marketplace, purchase the NFT and then pay a commission to the marketplace operator entity. It’s a total loss.

Consider the following if you were to create and launch your own NFT marketplace:

a) Capital Intensive: Think of launching a blockchain-based DAPP or tokenizing an existing platform without leveraging an existing blockchain network or using the smart contract feature. Imagine if there were no Ethereum or Solana or Matic or any other “smart contract” provider — how hard it would be to create an entire blockchain network from scratch? Creating a custom NFT marketplace can be equally complex and capital intensive. That explains why many DApps and creators end up paying what’s rightfully their’s to third-party marketplaces.

b) Time Consuming: Creating a custom NFT marketplace requires professional developers and designers working for hundreds of hours. It may take months to create and launch a custom NFT marketplace without Xircus.

*we’ve seen many solutions popping up lately that could tackle this problem where you can create and host your own NFT marketplace through a costly annual subscription model of $6000+ per year or a turn-key solution of $30,000 — $50,000 with limited features and no customization flexibility. However, a fully centralized solution where you don’t own anything and have to play by their rules with all kind of limitations does not match a web3 vision as we have explained.

Xircus is as flexible as jelly, and we created it to be used in any form of business with complete customizability in order to solve actual problems. Here is an example of how this might be used in the event ticketing sector:

Let’s start first with a little background about this industry: NFTs are disrupting the ticketing industry through the tokenization of event tickets. With NFT tickets, artists and event organizers finally have what it takes to fight ticket scalpers and take back control of the secondary ticket market.

Even though the online event ticketing industry was valued at $28.49 billion in 2021 by Mordor Intelligence, only a handful of companies control the dominant market share. This is of great concern to us and is why we built our Web3 protocol to try and play our part in addressing this issue.

Also, 12% of fans who bought tickets online last year reported buying fake tickets which shows how the ticketing industry is riddled with fraud and needs a radical change. It’s not uncommon for tickets to popular events to go on sale online, only to sell out shortly after, due to bots deployed by scalpers who scoop up these tickets, only to sell them to fans on the secondary market for exorbitant prices. Sometimes, these scalpers sell the tickets for up to 10 times the amount they were bought for.

The ticketing industry is currently broken and in need of a fix because the process of buying and selling tickets doesn’t serve the interest of fans, artists, or event organizers. Scalpers and other middlemen have hijacked the process, making it difficult for fans to attend their favorite events due to the difficulty and high price of getting a ticket. That’s why event organizers are now utilizing NFTs to enhance fans’ experience, increase their customer base and product offerings, foster community and fan interaction, reward fans for their attendance, and seize control of the ticket resale markets.

Although NFT ticketing is still in the early stages, it’s been adopted by ticketing companies and live event organizers such as Ticketmaster, Coachella, Live Nation, the Olympics, the NBA, and more to create a more immersive experience for fans.

What is NFT Ticketing and how does it Work?

NFT tickets are non-fungible tokens that hold access credentials to an event. They can be used to grant fans access to concerts, theaters, nightclubs, festivals, business events, movies, live events, sports events, in-game access, and other social activities, etc. They also offer fans additional perks such as exclusive merchandise, early access, meet and greet, and backstage access, to name a few.

NFT tickets are unique digital tokens that are minted and stored on a blockchain and can be sold directly to customers, who then store them in a secure wallet that can be accessed on any device.

Turning tickets into NFTs is the only logical evolution of the ticketing industry, as NFTs and ticketing share some similarities. For instance, physical tickets are usually a piece of paper or card that grant entry or access for only one event. They can’t be interchanged for another event, nor can they be used for another purpose. In that sense, both NFTs and tickets are non-fungible and unique because no two tickets are the same. Also, just like NFTs, tickets are sold in limited batches since there are limited quantities of tickets available to fans for any given event.

How NFT Ticketing is disrupting the ticketing industry

NFT tickets have what it takes to transform the ticketing experience for both fans and event organizers by solving the inefficiencies of the current ticketing process. With blockchain and Web3 technologies, we finally have what’s needed to make the ticketing industry more transparent.

Due to the immutability of blockchains, artists and event organizers can now differentiate their true fans from scalpers who only buy tickets to make money with resale, thus eliminating middlemen who hike the prices of event tickets.

With the advent of NFT tickets, the ticketing industry is expected to undergo a radical change that puts artists and event organizers back in control of the ticketing process.

NFT tickets can allow artists and event organizers to pre-finance their live events. They can use NFTs to crowdfund and pay for their events ahead of time. Artists and event organizers can incentivize their fans to buy into this pre-sell by allowing fans to vote on the venue or date of the event. Artists and event organizers can also provide additional tickets at a higher price to enable fans who initially invested in the project to sell their tickets at a profit.

Smart contracts are the technology that makes ticket NFTs possible. Ticketers can use them to execute automatically, control, or document certain events like the maximum price that an NFT can be resold, blocking ownership transfer, or sending a portion of the resale price back to the artist, event organizer, or the original owner.

NFTs tickets allow artists and event organizers to grow, engage fans and take back control of the secondary ticket market. With NFT tickets, artists and event organizers can:

Sell photos, videos, and merchandise as NFTs to fans who own NFT tickets.
Convert tickets into NFT collectibles that can be traded on secondary ticket markets. Offer fans NFTs that give them exclusive early access to upcoming ticket releases.
Host immersive events on the metaverse that use NFT tickets as access keys.
Offer lifetime NFT tickets to live events.
Use smart contracts to get a cut of every ticket sold on the secondary market.
Make more money selling lifetime pass ticket NFTs like Coachella did when they sold ten-lifetime ticket NFTs for $1.5 million.

How Xircus helps Ticketers

As we’ve seen above, the ticketing industry needs a complete overhaul, and that’s why we’ve set out to play our part in making ticketing accessible to fans the world over. At Xircus, it’s our vision to create a Web3 protocol that makes it easy for ticketers to create a tokenized version of their events’ tickets. We’ve created a seamless protocol that makes it possible to mint NFT tickets in minutes.

With our protocol, ticketers won’t only mint their tickets, but they can also set royalty splits, price ceilings, and make their tickets non-transferable. Our protocol gives ticketers the power to control the ticketing industry like never before.

Thanks to our protocol, artists and event organizers now have new and innovative ways of rewarding their fans with perks, such as exclusive NFT airdrops before, during, or after an event. Fans can either keep these assets as mementos or sell them in the open market, thus enabling fans to make money by being a part of the event.

The best part is that we are not just an NFT marketplace where ticketers can only mint NFTs. Our protocol provides everything ticketers need to build NFT marketplaces free of charge, with no hidden charges.

With our protocol, ticketers can easily create and launch a branded ticket NFT marketplace where they can sell tickets to upcoming events and provide other perps to their fans using our powerful, unique, and automated tool.

And here’s the thing: what if you dislike the UI themes or functionality we now offer or if you require more features? In this situation, this is where the strength of the Xircus SDK and its developer community will become valuable, as we will discuss in more detail in our next publications in the upcoming days. We will explain in little bits and bites what we have been developing, and why we have been creating this Protocol. Once the product, solutions, and ecosystem have been fully explained in a series of articles, we are confident you will understand why we chose this path in order to create a strategic advantage with this full development process, see below: