Corporate Web2 Giants, Ticketmaster, Disney, and Nasdaq, make Web3 Moves.

Despite the cooling global economy, things in cryptocurrency are heating up. As Bitcoin and Ethereum trend up, giant corporations want a piece of the action. Just this week Ticketmaster, Disney and Nasdaq made big announcements that involve web3 and NFTs.

Ticketmaster is launching token-gated sales via NFTs to cut out scalpers and benefit fans. In fact, the these new tools have already been used: Avenged Sevenfold was the first band to sell tickets via Ticketmaster's new system. The idea is that fans can collect their favorite artists’ NFTs; then the artists can sell tickets on the Ticketmaster site to those fans directly. In other words, sales are reserved to users who verify ownership of an artist’s NFT.

Avenged Sevenfold's Deathbat NFT allowed holders to purchase tickets to shows in NYC and L.A.

This system will cut out the biggest problem in event sales: scalpers and bots. A massive percentage of tickets are bought by people who only intend to resell tickets at inflated prices. With this system, artists can deal tickets directly to fans. Additionally, if the tickets themselves are NFTs, resold tickets will generate royalty revenue for the artist. This is a big win for web3! Via Ticketmaster, many non-crypto users will be driven to dabble with NFTs in order to save money on, and guarantee themselves a ticket to, their favorite artists’ shows.

Nasdaq is launching a crypto custody service this quarter. Late last year Nasdaq announced that they were building a custodial service for digital assets. This was in response to many clients’ desire to buy crypto without having to deal with the headache of storing and securing these assets. In a recent interview, Nasdaq’s Senior Vice President and Head of Digital Assets, Ira Auerbach, said that this service would be launching in Q2 of 2023! This is very bullish for Bitcoin and Ethereum which will be the first coins that Nasdaq will include in its custodial services. It is likely that Nasdaq will facilitate sales to some larger institutional-type buyers who could positively impact markets for BTC and Eth. 

Everything can’t be sunshine and rainbows–even for Disney! In contrast to Ticketmaster’s and Nasdaq’s bullish news, Disney has taken a step back from web3. Amidst layoffs to 7,000 employees, The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney’s 50 person Metaverse division has been axed entirely. The next-generation storytelling and consumer-experiences unit, was exploring how to connect Disney’s brand to experiential technologies, aka the metaverse. Now this effort is on pause. It is likely that the cuts are in response to pressure from stockholders to cut expensive and not-immediately-profitable arms of the company. The failures of Meta’s metaverse division probably play a part in this investor sentiment. However, Disney has not stated it is permanently abandoning metaverse plans.

Despite the Disney move, it seems more and more clear that the long-term life of web3 will be tied to the corporations and brands of web2. Gucci has been making several announcements regarding its partnership with Yuga Labs. Bugatti just aped into ordinals! Thus, one thing is clear: the question of crypto mass-adoption is not IF, it is WEN!