Ticketing and membership platform extends customer journeys through NFTs

Moongate allows event organisers to build relationships with their attendees post-event and beyond.

In a traditional Web 2 ticketing platform, a customer’s journey ends after the event, leaving organisers unable to build loyalty or relationships with their attendees. In order to change that, Jonathan Mui and Peter Hui built an NFT ticket and membership platform called Moongate.

“We are focused on bringing Web 3 to the mass audience. In our opinion, crypto or NFT, specifically, was really kind of misused. [It was used for] speculative purposes, and really just trading kind of profile pictures,” Mui told Hong Kong Business.

“Moongate is focused on building utility-based NFTs for ticketing and also using NFTs for kind of membership use cases,” he added.

Ticketing

On the ticketing front, Moongate helps event organisers and promoters extend the customer journey.

“Before the event, they could offer various benefits and perks and even upsell packages at a discount directly on our platform,” said Mui.

“During the event, they could conduct various kinds of gamification campaigns, such as scavenger hunts with NFT-based rewards using our platform. Then after the event, they could continue to foster the customer relationship by offering ongoing benefits to customers.”

He explained that there is a “gated-community channel directly on our platform that allows event organisers to maintain a relationship with the audience.” As such, there is an opportunity for attendees to continue availing themselves of benefits and updates throughout the year.

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One of the events that Moongate is working on is the ticketing for one of Thailand’s biggest music festivals, Wonderfruit, which attracts between 20,000 and 30,000 people.
 
“They came to us asking for a solution to figure out how to actually engage like past VIPs,” Mui said.

“In the existing system that they were using, there really was no ways to reward people that were loyal to them in the past. Everyone that buys a ticket is seen as a brand new customer, without any special benefits or privilege provided to those that are actually repeat customer or true fans”
 
Moongate’s proposal was for the Wonderfruit organisers to transform the tickets into a new form of “membership pass.”

“People that hold a special NFT pass, not only get VIP access to the upcoming festival, but over time, they would also be able to unlock a bunch of unique and exclusive experience that are tied to it, not only at the event, but also kind of like any other upcoming satellite event, or like future years’ events,” Mui explained.

Membership

On the membership front, Moongate helps businesses attract the younger generation.
 
According to Mui, most of the conglomerates they have worked with have existing memberships systems, but most of the users are 30 to 40 plus years old.
 
“Basically, they tell us that they want to find something that can rejuvenate their whole membership program and appeal to the younger audience, and they find that kind of NFT is a great way to do it because it’s fun,” Mui said.
 
Apart from being “fun,” Mui said doing a membership system on the blockchain allows cross sharing of data across different brands.
 
“If ‘Brand A’ wants to partner with ‘Brand B,’ in the past and in the Web 2 space, it’s actually very difficult and costly to set up from a data perspective,” Mui said.
 
“With our platform, because all the core membership data is stored on the blockchain, it’s just very easy for people to carry their digital identity across different brands, and reap different rewards,” he added.
 
Amongst the businesses that Moongate has been working with is an unnamed conglomerate in Thailand that owns some of the largest luxury malls and hotels in the region.
 
“We’ve been building with them for almost a year now a very comprehensive NFT based membership that will be implemented across their entire ecosystem of malls, hotels, restaurants, etcetera,” Mui said.  “I think the cool thing with this specific membership program is they’re doing a lot of cross brand partnerships, which is kind of one of the main benefits.”

Plans

With over US$1m of funding, Mui and Hui plan to make their platform “more immersive” for the attendees of their partner organisers as well as their community members.
 
In the future, Hui said users of their platform will be able to reap rewards across Moongate’s entire ecosystem of events and memberships.
 
“We’re going to transform to even more of an engagement platform rather than just a ticketing platform. Because to be honest, on the ticketing piece, our platform is already fairly well built out already. So, the next piece is just how we actually maximise the engagement from the attendees after that,” Hui said.
 
In five years, Hui hopes to expand the reach of Moongate to other verticals, including sports leagues.
 
“We have served clients in over 15 countries, but primarily more on the Asia side. In five years’ time, hopefully, we will also kind of expand our product globally, into even more countries, and work with clients all around the world,” Hui added.