South African-based blockchain protocol Tari expects to be leveraged by Big Neon, a new company developing a blockchain-enabled platform to modernise the ticketing industry.

Big Neon plans to use the Tari digital assets protocol to manage the issuance and resale of tickets through its platform to help promoters maximise revenue.

Tari, an open-source blockchain protocol, started development earlier this year by a consortium co-founded by maverick South African blockchain and cryptocurrency expert Riccardo “fluffypony” Spagni. Tari is being built to manage the issuance and transferring of digital assets, like tickets, loyalty points, in-game items, and crypto-native assets like CryptoKitties.

Big Neon is the brainchild of US-based technology and ticketing industry pioneer Dan Teree, who was president of online tickets sales pioneer TicketWeb and an executive at Ticketmaster. Teree also co-founded Ticketfly, which was sold to Pandora Media for $450-million.

He explains why he thinks it is time to build a new ticketing company: “Over the last five years, ticketing companies have been more interested in getting bigger than getting better. Big Neon aims to modernise ticketing by delivering the most powerful mobile tools and digitising the entire ticketing process,” he says.

“I think live entertainment ticketing and blockchain technology like the Tari digital assets protocol are on an inevitable collision course. With blockchain-based management of digital assets such as tickets, event promoters will finally be able to recapture revenues that are currently lost to the secondary market. From my vantage, it’s the biggest innovation in the ticketing industry since the first ticket was sold online.”

The Big Neon platform will be open source., ticketing companies all over the world will be able to leverage its codebase to modernise their ticketing platforms. Developers and entrepreneurs who are working on digital assets projects related to in-game items, digital collectibles, loyalty points and more will be able to use libraries, patterns and other code from the Big Neon codebase to speed development.

“Big Neon is still very much in development, and we welcome contributors who are passionate about building the future of event ticketing and digital assets to collaborate with us,” says Teree.