As we mentioned earlier, GET Protocol’s infrastructure is purpose built to hide technical complexity behind the scenes, so that creating events is easy & purchasing a ticket as an attendee is a straight forward process.
But that leaves a question - When in the ticketing lifecycle does a ticket’s NFT get created & how?
Let's first answer how NFT Tickets are created.
An Introduction to Smart Contracts
So you’re aware that NFT Tickets are created on a blockchain but how does this exactly happen?
Well, luckily there’s a type of blockchain program that gives NFTs their special connection properties - it’s called a Smart Contract.
What is a Smart Contract?
Like the name suggests, a smart contract is a digital contract that performs certain tasks in a smart way.
The reason it’s smart? Because it can accept a number of different pieces of data that when provided will run through the contract & output a result on the blockchain.
You can think of this as a bit like a digital ‘Vending Machine’.
The Vending Machine requires a few pieces of information which when provided will execute a set of instructions & output an item such as an NFT.
Take for example a Smart Contract that creates NFT Tickets, this smart contract requires certain pieces of data:
- Unique Ticket Number
- Event Date
- Ticket Price
- Ticket ‘Lifecycle’ Progress
When these pieces of information are provided, the smart contract runs & then outputs an NFT Ticket on the blockchain.
Viewing & Referencing a Smart Contract
There’s one more important secret ingredient that makes a smart contract a powerful tool.
When a Smart Contract creates an NFT Ticket it will always share a link to the contract that created it so that anyone can reference an NFT Ticket and find out what contract created it.
It doesn’t matter which person owns the NFT Ticket, or if it trades between hundreds of people, you will always be able to know which Smart Contract created a specific NFT Ticket.
A Smart Contract Per Event
Every single event that is created through GET Protocol’s infrastructure has its own Smart Contract which means all NFT Tickets sold for a certain event is linked to that Smart Contract.
This allows you & other platforms to always maintain a link to these NFT Tickets, such as know what wallet holds the NFT Ticket & provide exclusive access to digital experiences for only these NFTs
How do you do this?
Each Smart Contract has its own unique ‘username’ called a Smart Contract Address.
This address is made up of a long string of letters & numbers, which looks like this:
0xc916E4492Cf9f0555CFDd131333A1e778f9a6710
You can think of a Smart Contract Address as a sort of unique username that represents a Smart Contract or Cryptocurrency wallet.
This contract address is your magic key to referencing all NFT Tickets for a specific event. By using your smart contract address, a platform can check that an NFT Ticket was created under the given contract, in doing so providing access to an experience.
We’ll touch upon this in further detail a little later on - but hopefully this has created some excitement!
So how do I find my event’s Smart Contract Address?
Within your ticketing platform’s event dashboard:
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Navigate to the ‘Manage’ tab on the top bar.
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You’ll then see another tab which has an option: ‘Blockchain’
When you navigate to this tab, you’ll see either two things:
If you have published your event, after 30-50 minutes you’ll see your Contract Address in the ‘Event Contract Address’ box:
If you haven’t published your event yet you’ll see:
Once you publish your event, you’ll then see your address ready to be used.
When is an NFT Ticket Created?
As soon as a ticket is sold from your ticket shop, it is created as an NFT Ticket on the Polygon blockchain.
This process takes typically 20-30 minutes from the time of ticket purchase, to the creation of the NFT behind the scenes.
All NFT Tickets created through GET Protocol can be viewed transparently in real time on the GET Protocol NFT Ticket Explorer.
That’s it for this section on Smart Contracts! You’re now well on your way into understanding how NFT Tickets are created & how you can reference them.
Head back to the main article to continue: Here.