Ticket Engine
The Ticket Engine provides the ability to programmatically record events and ticket interactions within the OPN Ticketing Ecosystem and is the primary interface for recording changes to NFT blockchain state.
Ticket Engine abstracts away the complexity of managing transactions on the blockchain independently and provides cleaner and more user-friendly interfaces to utilize your event and ticket data.
Minting NFT on any blockchain requires knowledge and experience. Open offers a simple API for creating NFT tickets on the blockchain, and can easily connect to existing ticketing platforms.
With Ticket Engine, you can:
- Register your events on the blockchain.
- Define metadata for your events (start time, location, images...)
- Update events.
- Register sold, resold, scanned, checked-in and invalid tickets.
- Claim ticket sales to the user's wallet.
- Define callback URLs to receive processing updates.
- Retrieve information from a defined action.
The Ticket Engine API is designed to complement and extend your existing infrastructure rather than replace it, so tickets created using this API integration are often referred to as a digital twin of your main ticket instance.
This makes it possible to issue blockchain-based NFT tickets without affecting your core ticketing infrastructure or migrating sources of truth unless required. By twinning your ticket inventory with a blockchain-based native copy, you can explore the benefits of blockchain-based ticketing and open up these opportunities to your users without additional operational risk to your live system.
The three main entities available through the Ticket Engine API are events, tickets and metadata, and all of them can be written from the stream endpoint .
Events are entities that contain metadata about a virtual or real event, the right to enter which is granted with a ticket, and should not be confused with software or blockchain events. Events have a variety of tickets.
Tickets define the right to access an event. The association with the event is maintained by the ticket's eventId property, which must be passed when the ticket is created.
Metadata can optionally be attached to a ticket. They can include metadata about the event itself, but are most often used to define the core content and media of the NFT.
Open writes event and ticket data to Polygon by default .
Polygon has developed strong integrations with social media platforms and NFT marketplaces, which means that NFT tickets you create using the OPN Ticketing Ecosystem will be well supported online.
Actions
The Ticket Engine API was designed to accept a stream of actions, where each action is an operation you want to perform on the protocol.
Offering a flow endpoint allows protocol integrators to send mixed packets of action requests to the Ticket Engine API, and they will be processed in the order they are received.
Before you can register sold tickets in the protocol, you must create an event.
Two types of actions are available for interacting with events: newEvent and updateEvent, both of which require input of eventId.
- newEvent queues a transaction to create a new smart contract on the blockchain. In this way, each event gets its own collection with its own name and a separate address on the blockchain, which can then be used in researchers, trading platforms, and other NFT tools. All NFT tickets for that event will belong to the smart contract created by the newEvent action .
- updateEvent updates the event metadata on the chain, such as the start and end time of the event.
Event actions are not paid for and don't cause your account to be charged.
There are a number of ticket actions that allow you to change the state of a ticket on the chain:
- soldTicket will create an NFT ticket within the event contract created as part of newEvent.
- resoldTicket will log a secondary sale event on the ticket.
- scannedTicket issues a non-finalizing ticket scan event. Scanning can occur an unlimited number of times and should be used for multi-day or multi-gate events.
- checkedInTicket is a scan event that finalizes the ticket state. For a single-gate event, the check-in event should be used instead of scanning. Once checked-in, the NFT is ready to be credited to the user's wallet.
- invalidatedTicket also completes the ticket lifecycle, although it does not provide an opportunity to claim the ticket. It is used to invalidate and cancel events.
Updating metadata does not affect storage on the blockchain. updateTicket will change the NFT Content URI, which is the media file used on NFT trading platforms and wallets.
Event Contracts
Finding a ticket in the OPN Ticketing Ecosystem can be done using three components:
- The blockchain network on which it is issued, e.g. “POLYGON”.
- The index of the event it refers to, e.g. “2”.
- The index of the NFT within that event, e.g. “3”.
Combining these three values creates a composite key for each unique ticket, known as nftId, which is guaranteed to be unique for all tickets across all blockchain networks. In the above example, the full nftId would be POLYGON-2-3, meaning that this is the third NFT ticket, for the second event, on the Polygon network.
Because every ticket issued in the OPN Ticketing Ecosystem is ERC-721 compliant, it can be easily “plugged in” to other platforms and offer a more engaging experience for fans before and after the event.
- View the event directly on a blockexplorer.
- View the NFT collection on a Marketplace
- Create a space on Snapshot, so NFT ticket holders can vote on suggestions.
- Offer private communities and discussion forums for attendees using CollabLand.
NFT content
The popularity of NFT is largely determined by the image and media content it displays in the NFT marketplace and wallet applications.
As a Ticket Engine user you control the image and media content of your NFT tickets. For now, hosting images on that URI remains the responsibility of the integrator.
Display support will depend on browser compatibility, so you should check the content before updating. This is important as most NFT collectors will use a web browser to explore collections on the marketplace.
Open does not set file size limits, but NFT marketplaces may set content size limits.
The metadata endpoint is compatible with the OpenSea metadata standards.
Dashboard
During the OPN Ticketing Ecosystem registration process, you will be provided with credentials to access the Integrator Dashboard. Here you will be able to:
- Manage your account data and security.
- View daily usage and events created, as well as smart contract addresses.
- Top up your account balance to fund usage.
- Set up balance alerts to avoid depleting the available balance.
Ticket Explorer
Ticket Explorer is an OPN Ecosystem interface for reading ticket information from the blockchain. With Ticket Explorer you can:
- View registered tickets and events on the blockchain.
- View the timeline of an individual ticket.
- View statistics on traffic passing through the platform.
- View collectible tickets claimed to a wallet address on the blockchain.
- Access raw blockchain transactions for a ticket.
Environments
Open offers two environments for integration: a playground (sandbox) and a production environment. These environments are connected to their equivalent Ticket Engine environments, and data created in them using the API will be visible in Explorer.
