Hate Ticketmaster? Onchain RWA tickets may succeed where regulators haven’t

TIX, a settlement layer for the live-events industry, has emerged from stealth to apply decentralized finance (DeFi) lending and onchain settlement to a sector that has long functioned like a private credit market.

To date, the TIX network has facilitated over $8 million in ticket sales and generated approximately $2 million in venue financing. The activity has been conducted through KYD Labs, with TIX expected to launch on the Solana mainnet by mid-2026, the company told Cointelegraph.

TIX, led by Ticketmaster and Buildspace veterans, serves as the underlying settlement and financing layer for KYD Labs, a consumer-facing ticketing platform that raised $7 million in a funding round led by venture firm a16z.

While KYD Labs provides the interface used by venues and artists to sell tickets and manage events, TIX handles the onchain infrastructure, tokenizing tickets and enabling financing, settlement and repayment flows.

TIX aims to address what it describes as the live events industry’s credit-and-debt model, in which venues and promoters rely on upfront financing before any tickets are sold. The company does so by turning tickets into onchain real-world assets (RWAs).

In practice, the model is designed to allow venues to access upfront capital from multiple sources, enable artists to sell tickets directly and offer fans lower fees alongside more transparent resale policies.

Related: Securitize hires former PayPal exec as US tokenization gains traction

Ticketmaster takes blockchain technology seriously

While blockchain-based settlement layers are seeking to disrupt Ticketmaster’s dominance in the ticketing industry, the company itself has been experimenting with the technology for several years.

Ticketmaster has been working with blockchain technology since at least 2019 and chose the Flow blockchain in 2022 to support its non-fungible token (NFT)-based ticketing initiatives.

Since then, Ticketmaster has issued nearly 100 million NFT tickets, according to a report from TheStreet, which cited the continued integration of NFT technology across several apps as evidence of sustained adoption despite the waning hype since 2022.

Meanwhile, proponents of RWA technology argue it offers clear benefits for ticketing, including the ability to mint tickets as unique digital assets that reduce fraud and counterfeiting. Tokenization can also introduce greater transparency and control into secondary resale markets.

While NFTs and RWAs can overlap, they describe distinct concepts. NFTs refer to a token’s technical format, while RWAs describe the underlying asset or rights being represented. In ticketing, an RWA can be implemented using NFTs to tokenize access.

Related: Licensing-to-earn protocol turns intellectual property rights into RWAs