Host Stephen Sargeant (@lifesgt) welcomes @davbarrick, CTO and co-founder of @tixprotocol & @kydlabs, to discuss why ticketing is fundamentally a banking business and how blockchain can fix fees, fraud, and resale chaos. Barrick explains primary vs. secondary ticketing, how venues rely on ticketing companies for underwriting and advances, and why service fees function like “interest” paid by fans. They cover open distribution, speculative ticket listings, and why NFT ticketing failed by ignoring venue financing realities. Barrick introduces TIX, a Solana-based protocol plus a developer platform that lets secondary marketplaces verify ticket ownership, enforce resale rules, and automate royalty settlement without venues managing private keys. KYD Labs currently serves mid-cap New York venues and aims to scale toward larger markets, with a long-term goal of major issuers adopting TIX. Watch the full episode now! #aroundthecoin #podcast #Fintech #Ticketing #Blockchain #Ticketmaster

For years, web3 promised to change creator-fan relationships. Instead, social tokens, memecoins, and creator coins turned fans into exit liquidity. The real unlock: creators like @KINGJARED300 owning their audience, accessing capital, and building community on KYD powered by invisible @solana rails. forbes.com/sites/azeemkhan/2…

One of the constant themes in my writing for Forbes over the past year has been exploring where entertainment and culture are headed through the lens of digital assets. Last week, I attended a Drake album listening party hosted by @KINGJARED300 at SOB’s in NYC. The event sold nearly 600 tickets and completely packed the venue. Drake wasn’t there, though I did get a chance to chat with Rory from the Rory and Mal podcast, who’s also pictured here. What stood out to me is that this was an unofficial listening party with no involvement from OVO, yet it still sold out. Jared represents a new wave of creators building real businesses around fandom and community. He’s been a dedicated Drake fan for years, built an audience around that interest, and has now hosted multiple successful Drake-themed parties across the country. You might be wondering what any of this has to do with digital assets. The platform powering these events is KYD Labs, which uses blockchain technology on the backend. When people talk about empowering curators through blockchains, this is the kind of thing I’ve always been excited about. Not speculative memecoins or forced crypto integrations, but seamless consumer experiences where the technology quietly enables new business models in the background. That’s what makes this interesting to me. Jared is effectively building a scalable community business using infrastructure most attendees probably never even think about. I’m excited to write more about this because I think the next generation of cultural curators will look a lot like this, with blockchains powering the rails underneath it all. Article coming soon. Also, Iceman is album of the year by miles 🧊🧊🧊.

This GPT Image 2 prompt is going insanely viral right now. “Redraw the attached image in the most clumsy, scribbly, and utterly pathetic way possible. Use a white background, and make it look like it was drawn in MS Paint with a mouse. It should be vaguely similar but also not really, kind of matching but also off in a confusing, awkward way, with that low-quality pixel-by-pixel feel that really emphasizes how ridiculously bad it is. Actually, you know what, whatever, just draw it however you want.”