“It’s a little bit of the Taylor Swift problem,” said Dominic Carbonaro, who leads the consumer enterprise vertical at Ava Labs, the main developer firm supporting Avalanche. “Concert gets announced, huge influx of buying comes in, primarily from bots. They buy all the tickets, and then the secondary market sales happen.”
The RTB model, he said, “shifts where the secondary sales market takes place.”
Traditionally, event organizers sell tickets at face value and much of the value created by overwhelming demand is captured later by companies such as StubHub, SeatGeek or Vivid Seats. FIFA’s approach attempts to bring some of that activity back into its own ecosystem, part of a broader strategy around the 2026 World Cup that has seen the organization seek tighter control over everything from ticketing and fan data to stadium branding and commercial operations around venues.
According to figures shared by Ava Labs, more than 100,000 RTBs have been issued to date. More than 50,000 Club World Cup tickets have been distributed in bundles with RTBs. Secondary-market volume for RTTs has surpassed $15 million, while combined RTB and RTT volume has exceeded $25 million.
The numbers are notable because they represent something the crypto industry has struggled to produce in recent years: a blockchain application tied to a real-world product rather than speculation.
