A limited number of fans attending the upcoming California Classic summer league basketball series will serve as guinea pigs for a “Smart Ticket NFT Experience Pass” put together by the Sacramento Kings in partnership with LAVA and Flow. The “lucky fans” will be limited to 100 of the fans attending the summer league games taking place on August 3 and 4 at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento.
“With the Smart Ticket, you have the ability to assign more than just the rights to a seat but also the right to a variety of additional benefits such as merchandise, exclusive experiences and digital collectibles,” said Sacramento Kings Owner and Chairman Vivek Ranadivé. “Through blockchain, the Smart Ticket can be authenticated, and the attached privileges and experiences can be sold and exchanged. This is the future of sports, entertainment, media and all experiential business.”
The limited rollout will involve not only the tickets for the games themselves, but digital art commemorating the games, which makes sense given LAVA and Flow’s being the blockchain that powers the NBA Top Shot system. The selected group will be contacted to claim their pass, which will then be loaded into their digital wallets, along with funds good to use on food and beverages at the venue as well as the limited edition digital NFT animation of the event poster for the California Classic.
“Our partnership with the Kings and LAVA showcases our shared commitment to the fan experience and to finding new ways to engage and to deliver to fans ‘in the moment’,” said Flow creator Dapper Labs SVP of Platform and Blockchain Partnerships Mickey Maher.
Some believe NFT – non-fungible tokens – and blockchain ticketing to be a key component of the future of ticketing, which proponents claim will eliminate fraud and clamp down on “unauthorized” resale. There are many skeptics to this reasoning, given that it is an inherently wasteful technology due to enormous energy spent mining the cryptocurrency behind the scenes on the transactions, not to mention the fact that NFT ticketing would utterly strip consumers of the basic right to do with their tickets as they see fit, shredding the first sale doctrine that stands in the way of rights-holders dominating the entire ticketing ecosystem at the expense of consumers.
The fact that such tickets do not exist at all in the realm beyond eletronic devices also raises familiar issues about equity when mobile-only ticketing is the only option available to consumers, which has brought about significant complaint by low income and elderly consumers when forced into such systems.
Naturally, team owners are very excited about the prospect of unlimited revenue generated by every interaction that their customers have with their tickets.