NFTs Were a Scam. This is the Real Future of Tickets.

Recorded at Solana Breakpoint 2025.

Hodl Up: All right guys, welcome to another episode of Hodl Up. We're covering Breakpoint, as you know by now, and today we have Ahmed, the CEO of KYD Labs. I don't want to take too much of your time in the intro, so go ahead and introduce yourself. What did you do before crypto, how did you join, and why did you join initially?

Ahmed: Man, I ask myself that question all the time now. I'm not going to lie to you.

Hodl Up: Don't we all?

Ahmed: Especially in this market. I'm the co-founder of KYD Labs. In my past life I was a product leader at Ticketmaster, where I worked on building shows and technology for the likes of Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa, the world's biggest acts.

Hodl Up: Who is Albanian. From Kosovo.

Ahmed: That makes so much sense, dude. She's awesome. We did a virtual concert during the pandemic, in 2021, and Variety called it one of the top-selling shows. She's a superstar. It was really great. A lot of people love and hate Ticketmaster, actually a lot of people just hate Ticketmaster, but there's a functional problem in ticketing. One, fans pay fees all the time, and they're ridiculously high. Two, artists don't get their data. And here's a little secret most people don't know: Ticketmaster isn't really a ticketing company. It's a bank. Ticketmaster gets exclusivity with the stadiums, which make the ticketing decisions, so artists can't bypass it. Using that upfront capital, Ticketmaster can say to a stadium: "Listen, you have to book 300 shows a year. You have to pay these artists upfront, and you can't go on sale without this. So here's some capital. Let us be your ticketing provider for six to eight years, and we'll charge your customers a fee," which is effectively an interest rate. What venues and artists lose in the process is their data. If you're signing these deals, you need capital to put on shows, so that's always been the priority, but at the sacrifice of your data, and that's created the industry we see today. KYD Labs is a solution to that. On one side we're an integrated ticketing platform. On the back end, we turn tickets into an RWA that lets venues borrow against on-chain liquidity without giving up their data. Ultimately it lives up to our name, KYD: Keep Your Distribution.

Hodl Up: It's always nicer when you have the professional acumen and experience in a traditional industry first, and then realize that blockchain, crypto, could fix it. We've met a lot of founders who joined crypto because they were dazzled by the idea of making a lot more money. So I really like that you came into this industry with firsthand experience of what works and what doesn't in the traditional world, and then realized you could fix it with blockchain technology. I know you used to have an NFT ticketing system. Could you briefly walk me through that and explain why it didn't work out?

Ahmed: Definitely. Going back to 2021, we saw a lot of ticketing platforms come out selling collectibles. They'd go to venues and artists and say, "Hey, we've got this ticket, and it's a collectible." This was during the Bored Apes craze, Doodles, Pudgy; it was the hottest thing. But going back to my background: I knew you can't sell a collectible to a 60-year-old guy from Wisconsin who runs a venue, when clearly they sign deals because they need liquidity. So the whole concept of NFT ticketing was flawed in its premise. Venues and artists don't need collectibles. They don't need fan engagement. They need capital to put on shows. That's the fundamental need. So at Breakpoint this year we're telling everybody: listen, NFT ticketing is dead. KYD Labs was built on compressed NFTs on Solana. That changed two days ago, when we moved to our own standard, called TIX, which doesn't turn tickets into collectibles. It turns them into RWAs that venues and artists can borrow against to get liquidity. That was the solution we needed in the first place. I'm very passionate about this, because even as a technical standard, NFTs never worked. How many times have we seen NFTs get wrapped to bypass royalties? Royalties were the one thing people were excited about for resale. And I'm like, okay. Then Magic Eden, as we saw in 2022, couldn't even pay out royalties. It was nonsense. So I'm really excited about this. It's going to be a game changer, and the great thing is that it's working. It's been working for three years for us.

Hodl Up: A lot of founders get blinded by their initial idea and don't want to see past it. You realized, "Hey, this isn't working, we need to change the model." That makes you a much more convincing founder in my eyes, because you're adapting. But I like NFTs, and my heart is broken, because everyone I talk to doesn't think NFTs have a future. I'm not a technical guy, I keep mentioning this, but NFTs used to be where my mind went when I thought about the future of crypto and tokenization. Now you're saying you're moving toward RWAs. In your eyes, as a professional in this area, could we as an industry take NFT technology, improve it, combine it with RWAs and tokenize everything? I'm being as honest as I can here: I really thought NFTs could be used to tokenize everything.

Ahmed: When you think about the concept of NFTs, take away the tech behind it: the concept of royalties, of being able to collect something and have true ownership, is what got a lot of people into crypto. Frankly, it got me into crypto. I was looking at NFTs, and at XRP for sending money, because I'm East African and I have family back home. Those principles got me into crypto, and I'm not going to lie to you, I don't regret it, but I have a lot of white hair, or no hair at all, actually. When we look at collectibles, NFTs as a standard do have use cases. Super Bowl tickets, for example, which grow in value over time. Pokémon cards, Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. But it has no place in music ticketing. There are areas where it's applicable, and I think that's fantastic. So I want to be clear: NFT ticketing is dead. NFTs themselves, as a standard, are not.

Hodl Up: What about SFTs, semi-fungible tokens? They start out fungible, and once you use them, once you go to the concert, they become an NFT.

Ahmed: I'm not too familiar with that standard. SFT sounds like a gang. I don't quite get it, but I'll do some research after this. When we look at NFTs, the standard was developed and made prominent by Metaplex. TIX is a standard we built for our use case, and we see this time and time again. There have been discussions about the application layer verticalizing into the infrastructure layer, and we're a good example of that. Another example is Uniswap, with its wallet and Unichain: they've built specialized products and infrastructure to support their use case. We're doing the same thing here. TIX just does it in a way that counters the prevailing view in the industry today, which is that Web3 ticketing is dead because NFTs never gained traction. So I'm super stoked about it. And I'll do some research on SFTs; I hadn't heard of them.

Hodl Up: All right. Let's go back to KYD Labs and everything you're building. How do you plan to tackle the whole ticketing industry? It's huge: not close to a trillion, but a hundred-something billion. Is it monopolized? Is Ticketmaster still...

Ahmed: Oh, we compete against Ticketmaster. It's hand-to-hand combat, right in the trenches. This is Solana Breakpoint. We live in the trenches, you know what I mean?

Hodl Up: Exactly. I love that.

Ahmed: This is the thing. I go back to A Tribe Called Quest: ain't no such thing as halfway crooks. Since 2022, my team, which is small, has sold over $10 million in tickets, with over $2 million in revenue. These are things we've actually done. I'm the only salesperson on my team, with a phenomenal team of engineers, and it's not easy, but you have to prove the thesis. If I came to you today and said TIX is the new standard, and I hadn't sold a single ticket or won exclusive deals and beaten Ticketmaster, I think that would be nonsense. I call out founders on this myself. Personally, I don't believe creator coins make sense.

Hodl Up: I agree with you on that one.

Ahmed: They don't. They simply don't. They haven't gained natural adoption. Whereas at KYD, we've beaten DICE on deals. We've beaten Ticketmaster on deals. We've beaten Tixr on deals. This isn't a hypothesis; it's a fact. Look at the shows KYD powers: we're powering Led Zeppelin shows, and Dillon Francis in November. These are sellout shows of the world's biggest acts, at venues we've frankly spent a lot of time working with, in the trenches. Ultimately, when we look at this business, we think TIX will make it easier to sell in, because from an infrastructure standpoint, and we'll talk about this in our announcement today, it will be a standard and infrastructure that not only KYD can use as a ticketing platform, but others can use in the future.

Hodl Up: So you tried the NFT ticketing system and it didn't work. And then, if I'm not mistaken, you pitched this idea to Ticketmaster. Is that correct?

Ahmed: Think of TIX as an infrastructure layer, a standard for tickets. On liquidity: Ticketmaster lends out somewhere in the ballpark of $8 to $9 billion every year. It's not a small amount. That need isn't unique to us; it's even more pronounced at the highest levels, with Ticketmaster. When we built TIX, we didn't see it as something only KYD Labs could use. We saw it as the future of tickets. Tickets today are static. They're the same as the paper tickets you used to get. They're not programmable, they're not smart. With TIX, you really bring the ticket to life. It can consolidate royalties, it can be borrowed against, it can move and adhere to rules, so we don't see things like what happened with Olivia Dean, where scalpers got all the tickets. That in itself will be a game changer in this industry. So when we say, "Listen, we're going to sell it to Ticketmaster": as a former Ticketmaster employee, similar to a lot of people at Tempo with Stripe, we're in a very good position to get them onto our rails, and to actually solve a problem that exists not only for us but for the entire industry.

Hodl Up: How do you plan to scale KYD and TIX globally? You've been building and achieving a lot, hitting a lot of milestones and goals, but how do you take it to the next level? What's your plan for conquering the world, let's say?

Ahmed: KYD Labs is building traction over the next year. We're looking to get into another 10 to 20 venues in the US and win more deals, while also working with players like AXS and Ticketmaster to integrate them into the infrastructure. We're in the best position to do this, but these are still Fortune 500 companies. They'll need custody solutions and regulatory compliance pieces. We're working on those and figuring them out right now, so that as we scale the app layer, we're in a very good position to flip a switch and bring them on board in a way that's compliant in their world. It's very different from the crypto world, you know what I mean? That said, scaling the business is simple: more venues, moving up-market to stadiums by the end of 2026. By 2029, KYD Labs at Madison Square Garden, and TIX powering Ticketmaster, AXS, SeatGeek and more.

Hodl Up: I have a couple of questions, because your entire business model seems very unique to me. I haven't personally had experiences with Ticketmaster, but my friends in the States have, and they say they've dealt with bots a lot. Can you alleviate any viewer's fears that there's a bot risk?

Ahmed: You can't beat the bots entirely, right? Since the tickets are fraud-proof... Bots are something that Walmart, Amazon and Ticketmaster deal with at the top layer, and it's really hard to solve. For us, if a bot picks up a ticket that doesn't adhere to the rules, unfortunately the person who shows up at the show won't get in with our scanners, and it ends up being an issue for them. We also have logical ticket limits in our system, so you can lock it to two per person or one per person. As an industry standard, we're the leading product on that. But across the technology industry as a whole, bots get more sophisticated every day. We're ahead of it, and ultimately I think that with our solution as it stands, we're in the best position to prevent the large majority of it. Not perfect, but if we're competing with Ticketmaster and others on this, we're good.

Hodl Up: My second question, related to that: if everything is on the blockchain, can people see, for example, where a specific address is sitting? Does that raise security concerns, and are there ways to fix it? I'm curious about the trade-offs, because there are trade-offs with anything revolutionary.

Ahmed: It's obfuscated. We put on-chain what needs to be on-chain. The pricing data needs to be on-chain. The event can be hashed. We've done these things to prevent abuse, like harassment at shows. Privacy is a huge conversation; we've seen that with Zcash and with Aleo. One use case most people don't think about in music ticketing is knowing where someone is going to be and when they enter, because redemption is on-chain. So we've done everything in our power to make sure harassment and that kind of issue doesn't happen. But what's really interesting for us is the ability for other builders to build on top of that data: potential prediction markets on who's going to sell more tickets, or loyalty platforms that reward fans. We're not going to get into the token stuff yet, but Ticketmaster could potentially use admissions data to reward real fans, giving them early access to tickets. That's the really exciting part, and we haven't perfected it in this space yet. When I look to the future, those are the things that really excite me, along with figuring out how to balance privacy while allowing builders to build.

Hodl Up: You mentioned the token, so now I'm going to ask you when, since that's the most important question. I don't know if you even need a token, now or ever, but everyone wants to know.

Ahmed: Well, we'll announce that on stage today.

Hodl Up: Okay, we're sorry.

Ahmed: No, listen: we look at any token model we might use in the future as a coordination layer to incentivize... The goal of TIX is to do one thing: issue as many tickets as possible. So any specific feature or technology we build around it will be aimed at incentivizing that loop. But we'll share more.

Hodl Up: Now I want to talk about our own country, because we have quite a big festival there, and I want to know how it would work. Say we have connections to the festival and we want to issue the tickets. How does that go, step by step, as simply as possible?

Ahmed: You're both from Kosovo, right? The great thing about TIX is that there are phenomenal builders in Kosovo with ticketing platforms that exist today. KYD Labs is a US-based company, but a ticketing platform in Kosovo can use TIX, leverage that on-chain liquidity, use it as a standard, and effectively deliver an even better experience and own it. That's the cool thing about TIX. It enables emerging ticketing platforms and markets, like Kosovo, Brazil and Europe, to really upend the small foothold Ticketmaster has in those markets. That's what excites me. It lets them accumulate wealth and tap into on-chain liquidity as builders. If you look at your fellow countrymen, that's a huge opportunity for them.

Hodl Up: And this is the Dua Lipa festival we were talking about, Sunny Hill Festival.

Ahmed: Actually, you know what? Don't give it to those tech companies. Send it to KYD Labs.

Hodl Up: We'll send it to KYD Labs, man. All right. Given that your background is in music, what do you think about the whole idea of music on the blockchain? We had the likes of Snoop Dogg launching albums as NFTs. In my opinion it was ambitious, but I don't think it will ever work out. I like what the likes of Audius are doing...

Ahmed: I love the Audius guys. Shout out to Ray, shout out to the boys at Audius.

Hodl Up: But do you think it's realistic to see everyone using a decentralized version of Spotify, for example?

Ahmed: Absolutely. Look at Spotify and royalties: they recently made an announcement that significantly cuts income for a lot of artists, and that's the opportunity. When it comes to the music industry, it all boils down to money. I want to make this abundantly clear: every artist loves their fans, but an artist can't produce for the fans if they don't have money. So liquidity is a huge piece, and I'm excited to see how that plays out in music royalties, specifically use cases around borrowing against your IP. That's super interesting to me. It goes back to the whole narrative, guys. When you look at the misses in this business on the Web3 side, nobody really tackled liquidity, in ticketing or in music.

Creators need capital; they need debt. This industry is an industry of debt and of hyper-litigious lawyers. That's what the business is. If you separate the amazing cultural impact of music from the actual back end, it's very boring. The cool stuff is the output.

Hodl Up: All right. Now I'm asking the not-so-serious questions, the interesting, weird ones. You have the protocol, it's permissionless, and everyone can use it and build on it, which is amazing in my opinion, because that's what Breakpoint is about. I know the theme this year is revenue, and yes, we need the money, but permissionless building is what makes crypto what it is. Have you ever thought about building a blockchain altogether, for entertainment, not just ticketing? Music, movies, everything else.

Ahmed: When you have significant distribution, you see the app layer verticalizing into the infra layer, like I said with Uniswap, and now Tempo with Stripe on the distribution side. To be candid, I firmly believe the home of entertainment today is going to be Solana, and we're going to build this on Solana. This is our home. This is where we go to war. This is our trench. When you look at the scale of this business, focusing on technology when the real problem is debt... TIX solves what we need to solve. An L1 may be good for raising $100 million, but we're not here to raise money as a metric. We're here to, sorry, I don't want to say the f-word, we're here to make money. We're here to drive revenue, and there's no better place to do that than Solana.

Hodl Up: I respect that. I have a bit of a background in music, so a lot of my questions today came from a user's standpoint, and I'm really thankful we got to have this conversation. To wrap things up: what's the alpha for 2026?

Ahmed: Rock and punk music are coming back.

Hodl Up: All right.

Ahmed: Rock and punk are coming back really hard right now. There's a big resurgence. Evanescence is back.

Hodl Up: How can we make money from that info?

Ahmed: Borrow against your tickets and throw a rock show in Albania. Get Dua Lipa involved and say, "Listen, you've got to go goth. We're throwing a rock show." We'll get Linkin Park, we'll get Limp Bizkit, you know what I mean, and throw something.

Hodl Up: All right then. Thank you very much for being here with us, Ahmed.

Ahmed: Thank you for having me, guys.

Hodl Up: Of course, honored. All right, bye-bye guys, and see you in the next one.