Building Eventbul: What We Learned Designing Event Commerce for the Post-Fraud Era
Eventbul started with a simple hypothesis: event organizers deserve to capture the full economic value of the experiences they create, and fans deserve to trust that their tickets are real. Three years in, both hypotheses have been validated — and the real opportunity turned out to be much larger than ticketing.
Ibrahim Güzel
CEO & Co-Founder, Salesvex
11 min read
I attended my first major concert at 17. The ticket was bought from a secondary market seller outside the venue — a practice that was simultaneously illegal, widespread, and completely normalized. I paid 2.4x face value. The ticket was real. I know people who paid 3x face value for tickets that were not.
That is the event commerce experience for a significant percentage of ticket buyers at any high-demand event. The technology to solve this has existed — in various forms — since the early days of blockchain. The reason it had not been solved was not technical. It was that the existing intermediary infrastructure had no economic incentive to solve it. Their revenue model depended on the secondary market friction they claimed to be managing.
We built Eventbul to solve this for organizers and fans. What we discovered along the way is that solving the trust problem is only the beginning of what on-chain event infrastructure enables.
The Founding Thesis
Eventbul's founding thesis was specific: the event organizer, not the secondary market platform, should capture secondary market value from the events they create. Every live event is a limited, irreproducible experience. The scarcity that drives secondary market premiums is entirely organizer-created. The organizer should benefit from it.
This is not a radical position. But it required on-chain architecture to enforce, because off-chain resale rules are platform policies that sophisticated actors can route around.
The smart contract layer is not visible to the end user in Eventbul's buyer experience. Buyers purchase tickets with a standard payment flow. Their wallet is created and managed by Eventbul on their behalf — they do not need to understand blockchain mechanics to benefit from the trust and ownership properties of on-chain ticketing.
The Three Surprises: What We Did Not Expect
Surprise 1: Organizers cared more about secondary market royalties than fraud prevention
We built Eventbul primarily as a fraud prevention platform and expected organizer acquisition conversations to center on the security benefits. In practice, organizers were far more commercially excited by the secondary market royalty capture. A music festival that generated $2.1M in primary ticket sales discovered they were leaving $380,000-$510,000 in secondary market royalties on the table under traditional ticketing — 18-24% of their primary revenue.
Fraud prevention was important to fans. Secondary market revenue capture was important to organizers. We had to build for both audiences and communicate the value propositions separately.
Surprise 2: The attendance record was more valuable than we anticipated
On-chain attendance records — proof that a specific wallet attended a specific event — turned out to have significant commercial value beyond the event itself. Artists using Eventbul for concert ticketing began asking for access to verified attendance data to power exclusive fan experiences: early access to new releases for verified concert attendees, merchandise discounts for holders of multiple attendance tokens, direct messaging channels for verified fans.
This created an entirely new product category: the verified fan graph. A map of who has attended which events, how many times, across what venues and artists. This is not fan data that any platform had before — because no platform had cryptographically verifiable proof of attendance.
Surprise 3: Corporate event managers needed this more urgently than consumer event organizers
Corporate events — product launches, investor conferences, incentive travel, executive summits — have a fraud problem that is arguably worse than consumer events because the fraudulent participants are often internal to the organization (people who were not invited claiming they were, employees misrepresenting attendance for expense purposes) rather than external. On-chain attendance verification with verifiable ticket provenance solves these problems in a way that printed badges and QR code systems cannot.
The Eventbul Feature Set: What We Built and Why
Smart Contract Ticketing Core The foundation: a smart contract deployment system that allows any organizer to create a ticket contract with configurable parameters. Quantity, pricing tiers, transfer rules (can tickets be transferred? at what price? within what window?), and royalty rates are all set at contract creation.
Key design decision: we made the default resale settings friendly to organizers — a 150% maximum resale price cap and 10% royalty to organizer — while allowing organizers to customize. Most organizers keep the defaults, which tells us the defaults are right.
Wallet Abstraction Layer The single biggest adoption barrier to on-chain ticketing is user wallet management. Eventbul's wallet abstraction creates a custodial wallet for every buyer at purchase, linked to their email address. Buyers never need to see the wallet — they manage their tickets through a standard app experience. For buyers who want to self-custody their tickets in their own wallet, migration is supported.
Eventbul Exchange (Secondary Market) A first-party secondary market with on-chain enforced rules. All secondary sales go through the Eventbul Exchange, where the smart contract automatically enforces the organizer's resale terms and distributes royalties. We deliberately do not allow resale outside the Eventbul platform — not because we want to be the gatekeeper, but because off-platform resale removes the organizer's royalty protection.
Experience Layer Post-ticket features that use the attendance record to power ongoing fan engagement: token-gated content, exclusive pre-sales, fan community access, and artist direct channels. This is the feature that generates the highest organizer excitement in sales conversations because it extends the economic value of the ticket beyond the event itself.
Analytics Dashboard Real-time visibility into primary sales, secondary market velocity, attendance patterns (who is actually showing up), and post-event fan engagement. The analytics layer is designed for event organizers who want commercial intelligence, not just reporting.
Who Eventbul Is Built For
Eventbul delivers maximum value for:
- Independent music artists and promoters — complete secondary market royalty capture can represent 15-30% additional revenue
- Festival organizers — fraud elimination + secondary royalties + fan data create significant economic value at scale
- Corporate event managers — verifiable attendance, controlled access, and fraud-resistant entry for high-stakes executive events
- Niche community event organizers — the experience layer (token-gated community features) creates ongoing value between events
Eventbul is not currently optimized for:
- Very large stadium events (100,000+ capacity) where our entry verification throughput requires additional infrastructure
- Events that require ticket distribution through third-party retail channels (some regional promoters have existing retail partnerships we cannot currently integrate)
The Vision: Every Event a Community Asset
The long-term vision for Eventbul is that every event creates a durable community asset — a verified record of shared experience that organizers and fans both own, and that powers ongoing commercial and relational value.
The event is not the end of the relationship. It is the beginning. Eventbul's roadmap is oriented around making the post-event relationship — between organizer and verified fan — as commercially powerful as the event itself.
Ibrahim Güzel is CEO and Co-Founder of Salesvex. Eventbul is one of the platforms in the Salesvex ecosystem. Connect on LinkedIn.