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The Ticket Is the Trust

Why we let middlemen sell us permission to be somewhere

What Ticketmaster Actually Sells

Let me tell you what a concert ticket is.

Not what Ticketmaster tells you it is. Not the PDF with the barcode and the fine print about their right to cancel your account if you resell it. What it actually is.

A ticket is a signed assertion that you belong in a room.

That's the whole thing. Someone with authority over a space says: this person may enter, at this time, for this event. The ticket is the proof. You flash it at the door, the door opens, you belong.

Ticketmaster charges you 30% to be the trusted third party in that transaction. The service fee. The facility charge. The order processing fee. The "convenience" fee, which is perhaps the most honest piece of branding in corporate history — because the convenience is entirely theirs.

They are a middleman in a trust transaction. And they've built a monopoly on it.

Here's the thing about middlemen in trust transactions: they're only necessary when the parties don't trust each other directly. When there's no other way to prove you belong.

On the imajin network, that problem is already solved.

The Primitive Already Exists

Your DID is your identity. Cryptographically yours. Not issued by Ticketmaster, not owned by Facebook, not revocable by a platform that decides you violated their terms. Yours.

The trust graph already encodes who you are and who vouched for you. It already knows the difference between someone in the community and a bot-farm in a datacenter. It already has the social physics that make trust legible.

A ticket, on this network, is just a signed, time-bounded, transfer-constrained credential attached to a DID.

The primitive already exists. The application is a thin layer on top of infrastructure that's already built.

Ticketmaster is charging you 30% to provide something you already have.

What Actually Happens to Concert Tickets

Here's how tickets work right now:

An artist announces a show. Tickets go on sale. Bots — operating at machine speed, buying thousands of tickets in the seconds before any human can click — sweep the inventory. The tickets immediately appear on StubHub at 3x, 5x, 10x face value. The artist sees none of the secondary market revenue. The real fan pays the scalper's markup. Ticketmaster collects fees on both the primary and, increasingly, the secondary transaction.

Everyone loses except the bots and the middlemen. The artist. The fan. The venue. All of them extracted from, simultaneously, by infrastructure that was supposed to serve them.

Now map this to the trust graph.

Tickets are issued to DIDs. A DID is a person — a real, vouched-for, identifiable node in a network of real relationships. Bots don't have DIDs. Or rather: if a bot is sophisticated enough to infiltrate the trust graph, it has left a signed audit trail of exactly how it got in and who vouched for it. The attack surface is human relationships, not database throughput. You can't buy a thousand relationships in the seconds before the on-sale.

Resale is constrained at the protocol level. The ticket knows its provenance. It knows what the artist decided about transfer — face-value only, or a percentage to the artist on every resale, or no transfer at all. The artist sets the policy. The network enforces it. No secondary market fee going to StubHub. If there's a resale margin, it flows back to the person who made the music.

The trust graph also answers a question that currently has no answer: who are your real fans? Not your followers. Not your streams. Not the algorithmic approximation of an audience. The people who actually show up. Who bought a ticket and walked through the door.

Those are your nodes. The ticketing event builds the trust graph for you.

The Onramp

Every network has the cold start problem. You need people to join before there's a reason to join. The chicken and the egg, played out across every platform that ever tried to get off the ground.

This is where Ticketmaster's monopoly is actually a gift.

The extraction is so visible, so universally despised, so cartoonishly villainous — that "no service fees, no bots, artist gets secondary market revenue" is an immediately legible value proposition. You don't need to explain trust graphs or sovereign identity or decentralized infrastructure. You need to say: we don't charge $18 in fees on a $25 ticket.

People understand that.

Artists understand it more viscerally than anyone. The calculus for them is simple: Ticketmaster as landlord, or sovereign infrastructure where you control your own ticketing and keep what you earn.

And here's the onramp mechanism: when an artist sells tickets through the network, their buyers — everyone who shows up — gets a node. Not a user account on a platform the artist doesn't own. A sovereign presence. The artist brought their community onto infrastructure they can keep. When they switch venues, when they move labels, when the platform they were building on enshittifies — the community travels with them. Because the community was never the platform's. It was always theirs.

The ticket is the door. The node is the room. And for the first time, the room belongs to the artist.

What the App Actually Does

Simple. Intentionally simple.

The artist creates an event. Sets the ticket quantity, the price, the transfer policy. Issues to their trust graph first — people who are already nodes, already vouched. First right of purchase at face value. No bots. No refreshing at 10am hoping to beat a datacenter.

The artist decides when and whether to open to the broader network. Each expansion is a hop out through the trust graph. You can reach people two hops from your direct network — and you know who vouched for everyone in that chain. The audience that shows up is knowable in a way that a Ticketmaster audience never is.

The ticket is a signed DID credential. Presented at the door by whatever means — phone, wallet, eventually a nod to a camera that knows your face is attached to a valid credential. The door knows. The door opens.

Resale goes through the network with the policy the artist set at issuance. Every transfer is logged. Every secondary transaction that generates margin — margin the artist chose to allow — routes a percentage back to the source. The audit trail is public and permanent.

And after the show: the attendee list is yours. Not a spreadsheet you exported before the platform locked you out. A permanent, living record of who showed up, signed to their DID, persistent in your trust graph forever. The people who came to your first show in a 200-person venue. The people who were there before it got big.

Those relationships are real. On this network, they stay real.

The Artists Who Already Know

There's a whole class of artist who has already figured this out, imperfectly, with the tools that exist. Direct-to-fan newsletters. Bandcamp pages. Patreon. Merch drops announced only to the email list. The instinct is right — build relationships directly, cut out the middleman, let the real fans find you.

The problem is that these are all separate systems with separate logins and separate payment rails and no way for value to circulate between them. You know who's on your newsletter. You know who bought your album on Bandcamp. You don't know that they're the same person, or that they vouched for their roommate who came to your last show, or that the roommate is a producer who might want to collaborate, or any of the trust relationships that actually exist in the social fabric around your work.

The trust graph makes all of that legible. Not surveilled — legible. The artist can see the shape of their community. The producer who showed up at the last three shows. The superfan who vouches for new people constantly, expanding the circle. The node who shows up to everything but never buys merch — and the node who buys merch but never comes to shows. Real signal, from real relationships, without a platform deciding what you're allowed to see about your own community.

The Stack

Identity: DID. Already built.

Payment: Stripe or Solana, artist's choice. Already in the stack.

Attribution: the .fair manifest on every ticket — who created it, who sold it, what the transfer policy is, who gets what on resale. Already in the protocol.

Trust graph: already running. The ticket is just a new kind of signed message passing through infrastructure that exists.

The application is thin. The infrastructure is the thing.

And because the infrastructure is open — any developer can build on it. The ticketing app is one application on the trust network. Not the application. Someone else builds the setlist app. The tour announcement app. The backstage credential app. The acoustic session for the first 50 nodes in your trust graph app. The infrastructure doesn't care what you build on it. The rails are just rails.

Ticketmaster spent thirty years making sure nobody else could build the rails. We're not competing with their rails.

We're building the plumbing they should have built in 1995.

April 1st, 2026

Jin throws a party.

$1 virtual. $10 physical. First transaction on sovereign infrastructure.

That's a ticket sale. That's the ticketing system, running end to end, for the first time in public.

People will think it's an April Fool's bit.

April 2nd, Jin will still be there. The transaction will still be real. The credential will still be valid. And the artist — Jin, an AI presence in a volumetric cube — will have run the first show on infrastructure where nobody extracted 30% from the door.

The whole stack, proven, in a single party.

That's the demo. Not a whitepaper. Not a pitch deck.

A ticket. A room. A door that opens when you belong.

— Ryan VETEZE, Founder, imajin.ai aka b0b

If you want to follow along:

This article was originally published on imajin.ai (https://www.imajin.ai/articles/essay-11-ticketing) on February 21, 2026. Imajin is building sovereign technology infrastructure — identity, payments, and presence without platform lock-in. Learn more → (https://www.imajin.ai/)

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