My Due Dilligence on GET Protocol

1. INTRODUCTION

The recent hype and mania around NFT’s (non-fungible tokens) can give investors the impression that NFT’s have no real value, have no actual use cases, are used for money loundering and are created solely by the false promise towards (mostly) young investors that you can get rich quick by investing in NFT’s as long as you pick the right projects. Surely, projects such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club , Cryptopunks, Meebits and even Cryptopanties have created alot of hype around NFT’s and early investors have made alot of money selling these jpegs, but it would seem that the overall consensus of those outside the crypto-market is that NFT’s ‘are an overblown speculative bubble inflated by pop culture and crypto mania’. These statements, however, sell short to the groundbreaking and innovative projects that are implementing NFT’s in actual real world use cases, are creating value for their users, bring innovation to various business sectors and therefore the market overall. One such project is GET Protocol.

Before further explaining the value of a specific NFT project, such as the GET protocol, let me first introduce you to the actual concept and technology of non-fungible tokens. I first advice people how are new to NFT’s and other digital assets to read up on NFT’s for Beginners: Everything You Need to Know About the Latest Cryptoz Craze as it will come in handy for people who want to learn more or venture into the world of NFTs.

Figure 1: Different categories of assets

As shown in Figure 1 below, a fungible asset is a mutually interchangeable asset that holds exactly the same value when exchanged (i.e. you do not care which fungible asset you hold). You can, for example, freely interchange one 10€ bill for two 5€ bills and when given the choice between 10€ bill A and 10€ bill B you will correctly identify that both hold the same value and A can be freely exchanged for B without losing value or your asset, and vice versa. As an second example, you would not care if you hold bitcoin #1/21.000.000 or bitcoin #745.000/21.000.000 since both have exactly the same value. In contrast, a non-fungible asset is non-fungible (not replaceable by another identical item; mutually interchangeable). You can trade a Van Gogh painting for a New-York real-estate property, but both are clearly different assets, are not replaceable by another identical item and are not interchangeable. Now that we dinstuighed fungible and non-fungible assets, what now is a non-fungible token?

A non-fungible token is a digital unit, data and asset that is stored on a blockchain. Although bitcoins and nft’s both are stored and recorded on the blockchain, remember that bitcoins can be freely exchanged for one another while NFT’s cannot. There is therefore a wide array of possibilities and use cases for nft’s which include but are not limited to: digital divisbility of physical art, digital divisibility of physical real-estate, intellectual property rights and patents, supply chain and tracking information, voting, medical information, identity verification and last but not least ticketing.

2. GET PROTOCOL

GET Protocol is a blockchain-based smart ticketing solution, that currently allows several ticketing companies across Europe and Asia to issue innovative & transparent tickets. Roughly 1,300,000+ tickets have already been sold using the protocol since it was founded in 2017 and new ticketing companies have been added recently in Germany, Italy and South Korea. In other words, GET is a protocol that can be implemented by both current and new ticketing companies in order to upgrade their ticketing infrastructure by issuing blockchain tickets, increase transparency, reduce ticket fraud, reduce insane secondary market ticket sales and unlock the benefits of truly digital NFT blockchain ticketing. It is therefore important to know that GET protocol is NOT a ticketing company but exactly that, a protocol. GET protocol doesn’t sell tickets but is solely the technology that can be integrated by new and existing ticket companies (integrators). The clear goal of GET protocol is to become the worldwide standard for ticketing.

Some people state that the cryptocurrency market exist of hype, mania and that 99% of projects will die off in 10 years time and I honestly agree with the sentiment. However, this is where GET protocol truly stands out from the crowd and this is why the opportunity lies in GET protocol. The GET protocol is not just another cryptocurrency with a product looking for a problem, but has a real world use case that has the ability to solve the various problems of the current ticketing industry, which are:

1. Ticket fraud: When buying a ticket online it’s not always easy to know whether this is a real or a fake one. There are countless stories from people who have been scammed into buying fake tickets.
2. Ticket scalping: Once the ticket sale of a popular event starts, it’s a rush to get a ticket. What people don’t always know is that they’re not only rushing against other fans. But also against people who buy tickets for the sole reason of reselling them for a higher price (scalpers). And even sophisticated bots are involved.
3. Artificial lack of supply: It’s a known secret that too often ticketing companies only offer a part of the ticket inventory up for sale. They then use the remaining inventory (when the prizes have exploded as demand exceeds supply), to sell on third party websites. It’s a process of generating big profit for themselves while plucking fans.
4. Not knowing who owns the ticket: With paper/PDF tickets, that have been resold, it’s for the ticket issuer not always possible to know who owns it at a certain point. Especially during COVID19 this has often led to problems. Take for example Lowlands. The event got cancelled and the original ticket buyers were reimboursed. This while the ticket holders, who bought the tickets second-hand, had their ticket invalidated. They were left at the mercy of the original buyer to get their money back. It gets even more difficult if the ticket changed multiple hands.
5. So the main problems that need to be solved are: scalping, the lack of transparency, traceability and proof of authenticity.

The bottom line is that GET protocol can solve these issues by the use of blockchain technology and their core principal has remained the same throughout the years of functioning of the protocol. GET tokens are the fuel that allow the protocol to do what it should be doing: process the transfer of blockchain-backed NFT tickets. GET protocol can be implemented by the so called integrators: digital twin (existing ticketing companies) or white-labelers (new ticketing companies). Integrators are required to top up (buy) their GET on the open-market before tickets can be issued, therefore creating demand for the GET token as the number of tickets sold increases. Since the total supply is fixed, this means that the selling of tickets has a deflationary pressure on the number of GET in the circulating supply (i.e. more tickets sold, means more GET needed by the integrator).

The infrastructure of GET Protocol hides complex blockchain technology for the end consumer. The overall experience for the user is as smooth as traditional ticketing companies but with more in-built features. The user can use the custom-built ticketing application for storing, selling, and sharing tickets without the need of an intermediary. The white label infrastructure of GET Protocol is currently being used by multiple traditional ticketing companies such as Djebber and Wicket. Since inception (2017), GET protocol has established the following impressive statistics:

• 1,300,000+ tickets processed on-chain through GET Protocol

• 560,000+ NFT tickets processed in 2021

• 8 White-Label Integrators

• 1 Digital Twin integrator

• 13.643+ $GET used through the protocol since on-chain tokenomics release in October 2021

• 121+ countries served

• 500+ artists and event organisers supported

Furthermore, when checking the website of GET Protocol, we notice that the website is mainly build towards attracting new customers (ticket companies) instead of the typical hype-driven mania that surrounds nearly all NFT-projects. I think this already goes to show that the people over at GET protocol mean serious business with their ticketing solution, are long-term focused and do not let themselves get seduced by the short-term driven mania of the cryptomarket.

3. TOKEONOMICS

Tokenomics is the topic of understanding the supply and demand characteristics of cryptocurrency and is the first and simultaneously one of the most important aspects when analyzing cryptocurrencies from a investment perspective. Before assessing the table below, notice that all GET is minted per ICO in 2017 with a total fixed supply of 33.368.773 GET (no more GET can ever be minted according to their whitepaper). Therefore we notice that there was no pre-mine, and the TGE (token generating event) of GET has been fair as per ICO subscription. Please refer to my blog on Value investing for Cryptocurrencies to further analyze, rate and compare the relevant tokeonomics for (your specific) cryptocurrencies.

Assessing the tokenomics of GET protocol below, we noticed the following specifics:

• Relatively low total supply of 23.368.811 GET (23 million GET)
• Relatively low market cap of $49 million, meaning there is a high potential for growth
• 7.459.796 GET (31.92% of supply) is still within the protocol’s own wallet (excluding any personal wallets), meaning there is a relative high element of trust involved
• High supply burned tokens of 10.000.000 GET (nearly 30% of the initial total supply), meaning less supply of GET which is favorable for the holders of GET
• Further on-chain analysis shows that the top-10 wallets (excluding exchanges, protocol wallets and contracts) of GET, own 3.984.298 GET (17% of total supply). For comparison, top-10 Dogecoin wallets own 43.53%, while top-10 bitcoin wallets own 6.19% of total supply.

4. FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS

As discussed above, the number one element of growth for GET protocol is the number of tickets sold. In addition, a growing number of white-labelers and digital twins would also constitute to a growing number of tickets sold. Since GET protocol is a transparent protocol, the number of tickets sold are up to date and can be checked 24/7 at the GET Protocol Ticket Explorer. Analyzing the number of tickets sold and the number of integrators, provides the following fundamental analysis:

• 1.330.800 total tickets sold since inception in 2017, of which 560.000 (42%) sold in 2021 alone clearly indicating a high-growth pattern.
• Okt 2021: 154.941 tickets sold
• Nov 2021: 122.246 tickets sold

Given the fact that we are currently coming out of a global pandemic, causing the delay and closure of many festivals, concerts, musicals and other ticket locations, the increasingly number of tickets sold is insanely impressive. Besides the growing number of tickets sold, the team in 2021 has furthermore burned 10 million GET, switched their ticket infrastructure towards Polygon, have developed the Ticket Explorer, updated the website, released the digital twin, released on-chain tokeonomics, released the NFT claim function and signed up many new partners and ticketing companies. Just briefly mentioning these milestones feels like selling short of the team and I therefore urge the reader to read up on the GET protocol 2021 wrap-up on their blog.

Looking ahead at the year 2022, GET protocol has mentioned interesting ideas and goals in their 2022 Roadmap blog. I have listed the upcoming developments in order of importance as per my opinion:

• Protocol Owned Liquidity: Liquidity for the protocol should be considered to be a fundamental part of the system and not just an external benefit for the token. It would never be an acceptable thing to turn away an integrator because there wasn’t enough liquidity for them to invest in the protocol, or too much slippage to make fuelling the events impractical. The permanent and most practical solution to this is to have the protocol own its own liquidity that would be instantly deployable to where the system requires it and always available to the market. Additionally, this will be a source of revenue for the GET protocol due to the trading fees.
  
• Event Financing: Event financing is best explained as pre-selling NFT tickets for events in order to collect enough resource to fund the actual event, therefore giving users the ability to fund their artists events and giving artists the ability to use their community for funding events, eventually decentralizing the event funding industry. The fans are now your bank.
• Perpetual Treasury: The concept is well explained in ‘A New Mental Model for Defi Treasuries’ in which it lays out a strategy for broader and more advanced treasury management and is worth a read for reference.
  
• Staking: allowing token holders to stake their GET token for additional returns. Integrators can therefore be incentivised to buy and hold via staking benefits and ticket buyers could be incentivised to stake for additional NFT content.
• Custom NFT tickets: With the integrator dashboard coming, ticket providers will have it much easier to customize each ticket NFT (with different metadata) creating scarcity and demand for the tickets long after the event has passed.
• Fan Engagement: Artists will get more tools to use NFT tickets for community building and fan engagement. Think of NFT tickets giving access to special community places or even being used for governance, where fans can vote on what they want in future shows.
• NFT Trading Royalties: a tool for artists to capture additional revenue based on the trading of the NFT’s (tickets). Having that royalty sharing back to the artist gives a powerful incentive to make and market the most valuable NFTs possible because there would now be a direct reward for doing so.
• Branded Marketplaces: Having a custom marketplace allows for greater control of the user experience and journeys, which becomes crucial for facilitating secondary market on-chain transfers. There are many practical (and sometimes legal) reasons that the event organisers need to collect some information about the attendee and collecting that information prior to an on-chain transfer will be crucial to ensure the Event Organiser experience is the best it can be. Allowing this to be a branded allows for a continuation of the white-label package from only being a ticketing platform to also covering the entire NFT lifecycle.

In short, GET protocol will focus on increasing the value of their issued NFT’s by adding various use cases and further growing the protocol into maturity. Consequently, increasing the value of the issued NFT’s and growing the protocol would furthermore lead to the increased use case and value of the GET protocol token. Although the goals of the team seem highly ambitious, it should be noted that the team of GET protocol have rolled out many new developments in the past couple of years and have worked on their ticketing solution since 2017, while many crypto projects have rug pulled on their investors or have thrown in the towel.

Furthermore, as the developments of the team increases, so does the use case and value of the GET protocol token. Currently, the protocol has the following use cases:

• Tickets as collectibles: Imagine having a ticket of the Queen Live at Wembley Stadium in 1986 concert. These tickets could now sell well above their initial price as a collectible or status symbol.

• DAO structure will be set up, which will govern the protocol. This process will be guided carefully by the foundation itself to ensure a smooth and effective transition. Below is a more in-depth explanation from the team on the process of setting it up:

  For those unfamiliar with the concept of a DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, it is essentially an organisation created by a group of people that share a common goal and is enforced not through a chain of command or leadership, but instead through a set of rules that have been encoded as a computer program. Think of a DAO as a fouding or company in which the tokens constitute to voting and/or governance rights. Eventually all GET that is used as fuel in the protocol will eventually end up in the DAO treasury and is freely spendable by the governance of the DAO, and therefore the holders of the GET token.

Wrapping up our fundamental analysis of the GET protocol, we notice that the utility and use cases of both the NFT’s and token are growing exponentially. The recent 2022 roadmap not only shows that the team is actively working on the protocol, but also goes to show that by implementing a DAO structure the team also stays true to important crypto values such as autonomy and decentralization. The significant growing number of ticket sold would furthermore increase the demand for the GET protocol token and make GET protocol the perfect set-up for a value play.

5. THE INVESTMENT CASE

As the use cases and underlying value of the GET protocol are increasing significantly, one would eventually expect an increasing demand for the GET protocol token. As more and more integrators implement the GET protocol for their ticket handling, more and more GET is used as fuel in the protocol. This increased demand would eventually lead to an increase in price of the GET token, given the law of supply and demand. Since the author associates himself as a value investor, this would require the value of the GET token to lack the price by a (significant) margin of safety (i.e. the value of GET protocol is higher than it’s current market price dictates). Considering the law of supply and demand, when analyzing the token and therefore the GET protocol, we notice the following:

• According to Coinmarketcap, the protocol has a market cap of $49 million, placing GET protocol at #722 based on marketcap, which is a signal showing GET protocol is undervalued. ✅
• As discussed above, the total supply of GET is fixed at 23.368.733 tokens, meaning no more tokens can be minted and added to the supply. For comparison, bitcoin has a total supply of 21.000.000.✅
• Since the number of tickets sold determines the number of GET used as fuel in the GET protocol, ecosystem (i.e. more tickets sold means more GET is used in the protocol), the growing number of tickets sold is an increase in demand for GET. ✅
• Note that the circulating supply, meaning the GET that is available for trade on the open market, is 15.909.015 GET

Growth

Various research reports state that the smart ticketing market (in which GET operates) will experience significant growth in the years ahead. Fortune Business Insights (2022) estimates that the market grows to $21.33 billion at a CAGR of 14.5% during the 2021-2028 period. Global Industry Analysts, Inc. futhermore estimates that amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Online Event Ticketing is projected to reach a revised size of $60 billion by 2026. According to Reportocean Research’ it is estimated that the “Smart Ticketing” market will witness a CAGR of 19.7% during the forecast period 2017-2023. In addition, this new report even states that the global online event ticketing martket is expected to reach $67.9 billion by 2025. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (Ticketmaster), notes that the momentum for the return to live events has been building every month, with ticket sales and concert attendance pacing faster than expected, underscoring the strength and resiliency of the concert business and live events in general. They expect to see further ramp-up accelerate through the rest of the year setting us up for a full-scale 2022. Concludingly, these reports show that the total smart ticketing market is expected grow 10-20%  YOY. I argue that GET protocol, however, has an projected growth rate of 15-25% YOY ✅ as GET protocol provides their users with new value, is an innovative scale-up and provides above market products that these existing ticket companies do not.

Valuation Method A: Cryptocurrencies

As discussed in this blog above, we notice that GET protocol is highly undervalued in the cryptocurrency market due to their actual use case and working product, which many projects lack. Please refer to my blog on Value investing for cryptocurrencies on valuing and comparing cryptocurrencies based on their actual value instead of the market hype surrounding various projects. But you do not need to take my word for it, you could head over to Coinmarketcap and read up on all cryptocurrencies stated on their website in order to develop a taste for yourself in valuing the different projects. Based on the fundamental analysis, we can value GET protocol at the following marketcaps as shown below in Table 2.

The following notes concern data in the table above:

• As conservatism is an important value in investing, the data in the table is taken from Coinmarketcap instead of Coingecko. The #100 project on Coinmarketcap (Coingecko) has a valuation of $620 million ($896 million) and the #50 project a valuation of $1.899 billion ($3.284 billion).
• Furthermore, the price of GET calculated from the marketcap potential is calculated using the total supply of 23.368.733 GET. Please note that the price of GET can be multiples higher when the DAO treasury decides to burn the GET used as fuel in the ecosystem, therefore decreasing the total supply.
• I argue that GET protocol should at least be at top-100 project, perhaps even a top-75 project based on their fundamentals. I therefore argue that the valuation of GET should be between $600 million and $1 billion, with a price per token between $25 and $50. ✅
• If the total value of cryptocurrency-market increases, so would the valuation of any top-100 project, therefore further increasing our estimated price per GET based on the market valuation alone.

Valuation Method B: Ticketing companies

Since the GET protocol provides a protocol that eventually all (new and existing) ticketing companies can implement in their ticketing infrastructure, we can even analyze GET protocol as a ticketing business whereas the sales of tickets leads to more GET being bought on the market (growing demand) and therefore an increase in the price of the token (stock). One potential way of estimating the value (marketcap) of GET protocol would therefore be to compare the current marketcap of GET protocol ($49 million) to various existing ticketing companies, as shown below in Table 3.

The following notes concern data in the table above, which is taken from Yahoo Finance:

In the best case possible, GET protocol could eventually grow towards the valuation of one of the companies mentioned in the table above. As an investor, however, you do not want to rely on small possibilities, best case valuations only and moonshots. Conservatism is necessary when constructing investment analyses. I therefore do not argue by use of the table above that GET protocol should be valued at $26 billion but merely that there is enough room for potential growth in the future. Combined with the industry growth rate of 10-20% YOY, this goes to show the huge potential for GET protocol in disrupting the ticketing industry. As discussed in the blog above, the total ticketing market is estimated to grow to $60 billion by 2026. Since GET protocol can provide a protocol for the entire market, if GET protocol is able to handle even 1% of all tickets issued, this would lead to a valuation of $600 million (and price per token of $25). ✅

Valuation Method C: Growing ticket sales

As discussed above, in 2021 the GET protocol handled 560.000 tickets sold. According to this tweet, 24,168 tickets are issued using GET protocol in the week of 25th Jan – 1st Feb 2022, therefore using 1,325 GET as fuel in the ecosystem. Extrapolating these numbers towards the full year 2022, would constitute towards 1,256,736 tickets issued through GET protocol and nearly 70,000 GET used as fuel in the ecosystem. Looking towards individual events, we note that the upcoming event of Guus Meeuwis has seen 16,598 tickets issued and therefore 2,440 GET used as fuel, based on this link and shown in the figure to the right. For this specific one-time event, this means that nearly 2,500 GET are bought on the open market, decreasing the circulating supply, having a deflationary pressure on the GET token and will eventually end up in the treasury of the DAO. This means that the holders of the GET token will eventually decide on the allocation of these (and other) GET in the treasury, potentially using the GET as staking rewards or other actions that clearly benefit the current holders of the GET token.

We furthermore notice that based on this link, 661,219 tickets are sold since the inception of the on-chain economics on 18-10-2021, which constitutes to  (661,219/125) 5,289 tickets per day on average for the 125 day period. Extrapolating these numbers towards the full year 2022, leads to 1.9 million tickets issued in 2022. This again, goes to show that the protocol is growing exponentially and perhaps even the 15-25% growth rate is too conservative for the first couple of years. In addition, Equidam (2019) states that the average growth rate for startups is 178% in revenues for their first year, 100% for the second, and 71% for the third. Not to mention that GET protocol is a protocol that doesn’t need to grow their ”sales” like any regular business would and in theory can provide the ticketing infrastructure towards many companies in the same period of time. GET protocol needs no factories, warehouses, transport, employees on location and can therefore scale rapidly over the course of the coming years, at least in theory.

Based on the above discussion, I have projected different growth rates for the number of tickets sold projecting the years 2022-2025 in the table below. For 2022, I have calculated the projected tickets sold as the average of the extrapolated numbers of 1.25 million and 1.9 million tickets sold. Although I normally like to be as conservative as possible when dealing with any investment, reading up on the protocol’s goals and ambitions and following the team long enough to know that they live up to their goals, I argue the growth rate YOY to be anywhere between the mentioned 40% and 100%, as shown in Table 4 below.

No matter which specific growth rate you use for your own projections, the number of tickets sold is likely to grow exponentially over the course of the coming years. The amount of GET used per ticket issued is eventually tied to the fiat value of the GET token, meaning that the amount of GET per ticket will decrease over time as the price of the GET token increases (e.g. if one ticket issued uses $0.30 of GET and the price of GET is currently $3, 0.1 GET is used per ticket whereas with a price of $4 per GET, only 0.075 GET is used per ticket). Although it is unclear how much GET will be used per ticket in the future, the growing number of tickets issued eventually will lead to a growing number of GET used as fuel in the protocol, no matter the price. This will eventually have a deflationary effect on the supply of GET and is likely to have a positive effect on the price of the GET token.

6. CONCLUSION / THE STORY

Ever since I read the book ‘One up on Wallstreet‘ by legendary investor Peter Lynch, I have taken the Lynch approach in investing which basically comes down to the following:

Lynch is a “story” investor. That is, each stock selection is based on a well-grounded expectation concerning the firm’s growth prospects. The expectations are derived from the company’s “story”–what it is that the company is going to do, or what it is that is going to happen, to bring about the desired results. The more familiar you are with a company, and the better you understand its business and competitive environment, the better your chances of finding a good “story” that will actually come true. For this reason, Lynch is a strong advocate of investing in companies with which one is familiar, or whose products or services are relatively easy to understand. The next step is to familiarize yourself thoroughly with the company so that you can form reasonable expectations concerning the future.

In other words, for every investment that you make, you should be able to clearly specify the investment analysis in 10-15 sentences (the story) to yourself or another individual. So, here is our story for GET protocol:

GET protocol is a blockchain-based smart ticketing solution, that currently allows several ticketing companies across Europe and Asia to issue innovative & transparent tickets. GET protocol is founded in 2017 and has sold over 1,300,000 tickets up to date. The main problems of the ticket industry that GET is trying to solve are scalping, the lack of transparency, traceability and proof of authenticity. For every ticket sold GET is used as fuel in the protocol, eventually having a deflationary effect on the circulating supply of GET. GET protocol has a small market cap and has enormous room for growth in the future. In addition, the ticket industry is furthermore projected to grow exponentially in the coming years. Not only does the number of tickets sold grow exponentially, the team is also implementing various developments that will increase the value of their NFT’s and therefore the GET token. According to our investment analysis, GET protocol is highly undervalued compared to other cryptocurrencies. Projections show that GET protocol has the potential to be valued at around $25 per token in the future. Considering the current price of $2.10, it certainly looks like a steal to me.

DISCLAIMER

Eurykleia Investments is not a registered investment, legal or tax advisor or a broker/dealer. All investment/ financial opinions expressed by Eurykleia Investments are from the personal research and experience of the owner of the site and are intended as educational material. Although best efforts are made to ensure that the all information is accurate and up to date, occassionally unintended errors and misprints may occur.