Open Partners With Sophon to Revolutionize Onchain Ticketing and Event Experiences

Bringing onchain utility to tickets and restoring control to organizers and artists

We are excited to announce that OPEN – a pioneering onchain ticketing platform – has officially joined Sophon as one of the founding partners deploying on our mainnet at genesis. OPEN joins Sophon on a mission to redefine how tickets are issued, managed, and experienced. Together, we aim to break monopolies, give control back to organizers and artists, and deliver a 10x improvement in how attendees engage with culture.

This partnership is a cornerstone of Sophon’s strategy to drive consumer adoption through culture and entertainment.

Background

There’s no better fit for onchain utility than tickets. Blockchain technology offers unparalleled advantages across the entire ticket lifecycle that traditional systems simply cannot match. OPEN has led this transformation, issuing over 7 million tickets for over 24,000 events globally, including at iconic venues like the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam.

Why onchain ticketing?

1. Financing: Ticketing monopolies thrive on their control over event financing, often forcing artists into restrictive contracts. Blockchain offers new financing options through DeFi, allowing artists and organizers to fund their events without sacrificing control over their rights.
2. Transparency: In centralized ticketing, it's often unclear if "sold-out" tickets were truly sold or reserved for secondary markets at inflated prices. Onchain ticketing introduces transparency, enabling real-time verification of sales for both primary and secondary markets.
3. Control: Smart contracts empower organizers and artists to set rules for ticket sales, ensuring fair pricing and distribution for primary and secondary sales across any sales platform – all enforced on the underlying smart contract level.This level of control is a game-changer for event creators.
4. Experience, collect, and connect: Physical ticket stubs have been replaced by forgettable PDFs in the digital age. Onchain tickets go beyond this, becoming digital collectibles that fans can treasure. These tickets act as authentication tools, helping organizers and artists build lasting relationships with their audience through exclusive content, merchandise, or experiences tied to past engagement.

Issuing Millions of Tickets Onchain

OPEN’s cutting-edge ticketing infrastructure is built to handle millions of tickets per day, supporting global events at the world’s largest venues. This perfectly aligns with Sophon’s scalable, high-throughput infrastructure. Together, we’re not only bringing millions of tickets onto Sophon, but actually onboarding these attendees onchain for the first time without any complexity, all through their ticket.

"At the OPEN Ticketing Ecosystem, we’re constantly looking to push the boundaries of what accessible onchain innovation for everyday people looks like. That’s why being a launch partner on Sophon is an exciting cornerstone moment for OPEN," said Colby, Head of Onchain Strategy & Marketing at OPEN. "Sophon’s consumer friendly infrastructure and culture-first approach perfectly aligns with our mission to bring the entire events industry onchain and directly onboarding everyday event attendees into a blend of Sophon and OPEN’s ecosystem makes us confident that we're delivering a 10x leap in the ticketing experience for organizers, artists, and attendees."

"Ticketing should add to the experience of culture, not get in the way. OPEN is solving a real problem and bringing value to everyday lives, exactly what we’re about at Sophon. Seamlessly improving how we engage with culture and entertainment by embedding the value of crypto into real-world use cases," said Sebastien, Co-Founder & CEO of Sophon.

Read more about how OPEN works under the hood:

• An Introduction to OPEN
• OPEN Ticketing Ecosystem: Transforming The Ticketing Industry With Blockchains
• How OPEN issues millions of tickets onchain

A Glimpse Into the Future

Our partnership marks the beginning of an ambitious roadmap aimed at redefining the events industry and bringing onchain utility to the masses. In collaboration with Sophon, OPEN plans to launch a movement to unite the events industry around a common and shared goal - to change the events industry for the better, from the ground up and eradicate ticketing monopolies in the process. 

Together, we’re committed to making onchain ticketing the new standard for events, with a relentless focus on turning this vision into a global reality.

About OPEN Ticketing

The OPEN Ticketing Ecosystem is building a new global ticketing industry from the ground up that puts artists and organizers back in control of their events. Since 2016, millions of tickets and thousands of events have tapped into OPEN’s accessible and user friendly onchain ticketing infrastructure, that allows for decentralized event financing, control of primary and secondary sales revenue and data and the ability to create a lasting connection between fans and creators. Anyone can join the OPEN movement and contribute to bringing down ticketing monopolies and putting control back into the hands of artists, organizers and fans.

About Sophon

Sophon is an intuitive ecosystem for consumer applications designed to enrich the digital world – in gaming, social, art, AI, prediction markets, and beyond. With the grand vision of changing how users live, play, create, and connect in the internet economy, Sophon is laser-focused on creating seamless customer experiences. Technically, Sophon is built as a modular rollup (Validium) leveraging the ZK Stack.