According to a report Friday from industry magazine, TheTicketingBusiness, Lancashire Cricket Club developed the new solution in partnership with the blockchain ticketing provider TIXnGO.
A county cricket club in the U.K. is to use blockchain-based ticketing for all domestic and international fixtures played at its home ground in 2020.
The new blockchain tickets are said to be entirely traceable, unique to the purchaser and nearly impossible to counterfeit. The system also includes a new facility that simplifies the process of transferring or reselling tickets.
Following 18-months of development, the new platform comes off the back of a successful trial of the technology during the 2019 season,according to the report.
Friday’s release marks one of the first examples of sporting organizations using blockchain-secured ticketing technology, according to John Nuttal, Lancashire’s head of ticketing and digital systems. With more and more ticket sales being made online, it’s «vitally important that we continue to improve the digital ticking technologies,» he said.
“Blockchain technology addresses many of the ticketing issues that both sports organisations and fans alike face,» said David Hornby, UK managing director of SecuTix, Lancashire’s existing ticketing provider and the sister organization of TIXnGO. «It easily plugs into Lancashire’s existing ticketing system to give fans a better and more secure digital mobile tickets experience.”
The European soccer association UEFA said it was experimenting blockchain-based ticketing app, announcing a successful trial in 2018. But other sports entities have trialled the technology within a much broader range of use cases. The U.S. ice hockey team LA Kings introduced a blockchain app last year to help fans verify official merchandise, and in 2018, Italian soccer club Juventus said it was launching a token that would give fans a «voice.»
Ubisoft Might Be The First Major Games Company To Geek Out Over Blockchain
It’s already well-theorized that it’s not cryptocurrency or decentralized finance apps, but gaming that will actually drive blockchain use cases in the real world.
While this has moved many smaller development companies and hobbyist programmers to release their own blockchain-driven games, distributed ledger technology’s reception among mainstay gaming companies has so far largely been neutral.
A new partnership between old players
But that’s about to change in the wake of Ubisoft’s partnership with Ultra, a DLT-driven gaming platform that might be fairly described as Steam on the blockchain. Users can earn digital currency, buy games, and resell them.
Ubisoft is the mainstream gaming giant responsible for the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Far Cry, and a whole range of other commercial hits. The company knows how to make and market games that people actually play, and they know how to do it exceptionally well.
The professional, at-scale approach to game development within a blockchain paradigm isn’t exactly common. Most blockchain games nowadays are by passion project developers or small-scale commercial enterprises. Perhaps due to the technology’s association with regulatory uncertainty, game developer heavyweights are mostly keeping blockchain at arm’s length. Except now Ubisoft is going to become a block producer on Ultra’s associated UOS blockchain.
Meaning for the future
This move is purportedly about lending UOS more trust since Ubisoft is such an established company, and its hardware is now part of the ecosystem that approves transactions in UOS tokens that are confirmed by other block producers. It is also not too great a stretch of the imagination to hypothesize that Ubisoft could begin developing blockchain-dependent games for the Ultra platform.
But that’s raw speculation for now. Until then, Ubisoft is lending its hardware and credibility in support of a new crypto gaming project.
