Disclaimer: I will be taking part in the Aventus ICO (Initial Coin Offering). My reasoning behind why I have done so is explained below. I am in no other way affiliated with the company but believe in the project and the opportunity it presents to individuals, and the ability to solve a very real world problem. I am not a financial advisor and am merely presenting my opinion. Do your own research before investing into any ICO.

On a side note, if you agree with my thoughts on the prospects of this opportunity, please feel free to up-vote my post to help spread the word!

Introduction

The live entertainment industry is huge. I don’t really need to emphasize its size in too much detail as it will be apparent to any human with a pulse. Global ticket sales are projected to grow to $23 billion in 2021. Music events alone are seeing 7% PA growth. This is worth a read to find out more about the market and how it's expanding.

The main issue that the industry faces surrounds the way that tickets are bought and sold. These problems occur on several levels:

• Mainstream resellers fees. Perhaps the least important issue, but one we will touch on is the high fees that the likes of Ticketmaster charge. These fees reduce the profit of event organizers and increase the cost to individuals who purchase these tickets.
• Touts/bots. Many tickets are bought by touts who have bots that are programmed to purchase large quantities of tickets when they are released onto the market. This reduces the supply of face-value priced tickets that are available to genuine fans which leads me onto my next point.
• Price manipulation/inflation. The secondary market is unregulated, and it is here where many of the main issues arise. Tickets that were bought by touts are resold on the secondary market for huge profits. For example, Adele tickets that are normally sold on the primary market for £50-100 and are then sold on for many hundreds or even thousands of pounds. This is even happening with theatre productions. Last year tickets for the Harry Potter musical, with a maximum face-value of £140 were being resold for almost £9000. Pretty much every in-demand live event is facing the same problem.
• Counterfeiting. In many cases, when resellers bulk buy tickets, they list the same ticket on multiple secondary market platforms. The issue comes when the ticket is sold and the reseller doesn’t remove it from the other platforms. It is then sold as a counterfeit.

The following is a good article to learn more about the problems that the ticket industry is facing: https://www.consumerreports.org/money/why-ticket-prices-are-going-through-the-roof/.

The Aventus concept/vision

Aventus is an exciting startup that aims to revolutionize the ticketing marketplace and rectify many of the problems I have discussed.

By utilizing blockchain, they will be able to stamp-out the persistent fraud and manipulation of pricing. This is a win not just for event organizers, but for the fans, who will stand a much better chance of buying a ticket to an event at a fair price.

Another interesting innovation is that Aventus will allow anyone to set up a market for a live event and sell tickets by de-siloing traditional ticketing databases and allowing any sales channel to bid on ticketing inventory, sell tickets for an event, and gain revenue from doing so. This essentially means you, or I, could become an events promoter.

Potential seems limitless and demand for the Aventus platform could come from pretty much anywhere where an event is to be held. One market that just sprang to mind is the hundreds of Student Unions across the UK and their international equivalents.

The coin/token. One of the key aspects I look at when analysing an ICO is how the coin/token relates to the project itself, and how dependent the project is on it. With some ICOs you look at an idea that encompasses a coin that doesn’t necessarily need to be used for the project/platform to function. This isn’t the case with Aventus. I don’t want to regurgitate already published information, when it has already been explained perfectly, so I would recommend reading the “AVT’s Use Cases” part of this article.

AVT tokens will be limited to a maximum supply of 10 million with 60% being sold in the crowd sale, 19.5% on “new user incentives”, 18% to staff/founders/advisors/corporate partners, and 2.5% on bounties that are issued to help with promotion.

The chart below shows where the crowdsale funds will be allocated:

The team. Aventus was co-founded by Alan Vey and Annika Monari. Alan has a Masters degree in Computing from Imperial College London and wrote his thesis on blockchain-based film rights distribution. Annika has a Masters in physics, also from Imperial College, and did her thesis in artificial intelligence-based particle physics with the CMS experiment at CERN.

The rest of the team is stacked full of clearly talented individuals. They have seven full time staff that have a good spread of experience across blockchain, programming, and the entertainment industry. There are also seven advisors onboard, each offering high level experience in fields from financial advice to cryptocurrency research.

Pre-ICO. I always like to see a pre-ICO reach its hardcap and this is what happened with Aventus, which sold out in 4 days, raising 27,000 ETH in the process.

“Buzz-factor” and Community. There seem to be many, many people interested in this project and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the ICO sell out within hours. The bitcointalk.org thread on the Aventus ICO is 33 pages long and its slack channel has almost 5000 members. If each of the slack members purchases 12 ETH of AVT, the hard cap will be reached. This alone is probably unlikely but when you factor in non-slack members and potential VC and institutional investors, it is quite reasonable to assume that the hardcap of 60,000 ETH will be raised. The following post from its site further fortifies this assumption:
https://blog.aventus.io/white-list-update-6245b4d4bb3d

Aventus’ website. From an aesthetics perspective, the website is probably one of the best I’ve seen from a tech startup. The white, purple, and pink over black color scheme is ideal for the industry it is looking to dominate. In terms of information, the site offers everything I am interested in. There is a blog with regular updates, a roadmap to mass market adoption, and a highly-detailed whitepaper.

The one downside, as we often find with similar startups, is the domain extension the site is running on. Rather than using Aventus.io, I would far prefer to see it using Aventus.com. Unfortunately, an established business is already using this domain.

The Name. Aventus as a name suits the project perfectly. It is a nice play on the words “event” and “us” and importantly is memorable and easily pronounced.

Conclusion

As an ICO speculator, I look for certain criteria to be satisfied. Is the project one that solves a real-world problem and is that problem something that resonates with me? Is the team solid? I also ask myself whether the startup has a clearly explained whitepaper and roadmap, among many other things. While analyzing the Aventus project almost all my criteria are satisfied.

Concerns

Although almost everything seems to be going for the Aventus project, there are a couple of small concerns:

• The core team is very young but they seem to have compensated for this by having a pool of highly experienced advisors at their disposal.
• As previously mentioned, I am not a huge fan of the .io domain extension. This though seems to be pretty much part-and-parcel with many startup tech companies these days.

I should also add is that I haven’t experimented with the product/platform itself so can’t comment on the usability of it. For those of you with programming knowledge, it can be found here. If you have tested it then I would love to hear your feedback, below.

Thanks for reading and don't forget to vote the article up if you enjoyed my contribution! You can also follow me for future ICO insights.