TIX, the settlement layer for the live events industry, has come out of hiding to apply decentralized finance (DeFi) to onchain lending and settlements in 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 was conducted through KYD Labs, and TIX is expected to launch on the Solana mainnet by mid-2026, the company told Cointelegraph.
TIX, led by Ticketmaster and Buildspace veterans, is the core billing 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 powers the onchain infrastructure, tokenizing tickets and enabling financing, settlement and repayment flows.
TIX aims to solve what it calls the live events industry’s credit-and-debt model, in which venues and promoters rely on up-front financing before any tickets are sold. The company does this by turning tickets into real onchain assets (RWA).
In practice, this model aims to allow venues to access seed capital from multiple sources, allow artists to sell tickets directly, and offer fans lower fees with more crystal clear resale policies.
Related: Securitize hires former PayPal executive as tokenization gains traction in US
Ticketmaster takes blockchain technology seriously
While blockchain-based billing layers seek 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 in 2022 it selected the Flow blockchain to support non-fungible token (NFT) ticketing initiatives.
Since then, Ticketmaster has issued almost 100 million NFT tickets, according to a report from TheStreet, who cited the continued integration of NFT technology across several apps as evidence of continued adoption of the technology despite waning hype from 2022 onwards.
Meanwhile, proponents of RWA technology argue that it offers clear ticketing benefits, including the ability to mint tickets as unique digital assets that reduce fraud and counterfeiting. Tokenization can also bring greater transparency and control to secondary resale markets.
While NFTs and RWAs may overlap, they describe distinct concepts. NFTs refer to the technical format of a token, while RWAs describe the underlying asset or rights represented. For ticketing, RWAs can be implemented using NFTs to tokenize access.
Related: The licensing-to-monetize protocol turns intellectual property rights into RWA assets
