UK-Based Lancashire Cricket Club Will Leverage Blockchain-Secured Ticketing

The England-based Lancashire Cricket Club has recently made an announcement. The announcement was regarding the club’s new partnership with TIXnGo, a mobile ticketing platform that leverages blockchain technology. With this partnership, TIXnGO will serve as the ticketing platform for all fixtures, domestic or international, hosted at Emirates Old Trafford stadium. With this new partnership, the Lancashire Cricket Club serves as the first of its kind to make use of a blockchain-based system to sell tickets.

Forgeries-Be-Gone

With blockchain technology, there are key advantages. The most obvious of which in this case is the elimination of fake tickets, something the club mentioned in its public statement regarding it.

The Lancashire Cricket Club’s head of ticketing and digital systems made an interesting observation. Of the tickets bought last season, 80% of it was done online, via the blockchain platform’s technology.

Providing Fair Use For Fans And Clubs

SecuTix, the current ticket provider for Lancashire and sister company of TIXnGO, had its UK managing director, David Hornby, explain a few things. He stated that the new blockchain integration serves as a way to combat ticketing issues that were faced by both sports organizations and the fans thereof. He further noted that Lancashire’s existing system doesn’t need a lot of work to add the feature, with it just needing to be plugged into the software.

He further explained that TIXnGO allows for the creation of encrypted tickets via smartphones. The process is fully traceable, and completely removes risks that counterfeit tickets could be made. It ultimately simplifies the transferring and reselling process of tickets, according to Hornby.

Emerging Technologies

There have already been many talks all across the world for the adoption of blockchain technology within the ticketing industry. With the ability to create immutable tickets that cannot be forged, it serves as an obvious move for the technology’s integration. Alphawallet, a tokenization firm, had officially partnered up with the Union of European Football Associations, or UEFA, for the next European Football championship. Through integration with the Ethereum network, Alphawallet is intent on creating 20,000 tokens based on a custom blockchain. These tokens will back the tickets of the “Euro 2020” tournament.

EUFA had already revealed that the union had started experimentation with a blockchain-based ticketing system as early as 2018. An ice-hockey team from the US, the LA Kings, had already introduced a similar system back in 2019. This blockchain app was developed to help the team’s fans verify official merchandise.