Grayscale's investor letter shared key trends to watch in H1 2022:

1. Crypto infrastructure development
2. The proliferation of crypto protocols
3. Web3 and metaverse expansion
4. NFT use cases beyond digital art
5. New regulation and policies in the US

It is not surprising to see the trends about Web3 and NFT use cases mentioned. In 2021, NFTs have seen a huge increase in interest throughout the year. Many people, including major brands like VISA, shared their sentiment about NFTs and discussed use cases beyond digital art. Strong real-world use cases that disrupt businesses will prevail. One of such use cases I think is NFT Ticketing.

There are plenty of articles outlining why NFT Ticketing is a game-changer for the event industry.^1-3 Over the past year, many influential people knowledgeable in the industry have spoken positively about NFTs and how they will disrupt the ticketing industry, such as Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Shelly Palmer.

Mark Cuban has been particularly interested in being monetizing the secondary markets with royalty functionalities on NFTs.^4-5 In March 2021 Cuban stated:

“With the [Mavericks], we’re trying to find a good option for turning our tickets into NFTs,” “We want to be able to find ways so that not only can our consumers, our fans, buy tickets and resell them, but we continue to make a royalty on them.” - Mark Cuban

In a podcast from Joe Pompliano with SeatGeek, CEO Jack Groetzinger stated he thinks nearly 100% of all tickets will include NFT components.^6-7

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Another recent example is Gary Vaynerchuk's interview with Yahoo! Finance on NFTs⁸

“I don’t see a world in 2032 where every ticket to every sporting event is not an NFT.”

The benefits of NFT ticketing go much beyond the value of collecting NFT tickets

Benefits of NFT tickets include:

• Increased profitability - Total control and insights over the primary & secondary market. Take in the profit that would have gone to scalpers.
• Collectible - Tickets become tradable digital collectibles (NFTs), with a variety of awesome possibilities for fans & event organizers.
• Unrivaled data - Clear, verifiable data on ticket ownership, vastly improving marketing efforts.
• Web 3.0 bridge - NFT Tickets enable accessible entrance into Web 3.0 platforms and protocols
• **Pre-financing events******⁹ - NFTxDefI, allows event organizers to use their ticketing inventory as collateral in exchange for upfront funding of NFTs

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Therefore, I believe the trends that Grayscale foresees for 2022 are a huge endorsement towards strong use cases like NFT ticketing and thus to the work GET Protocol, YellowHeart, and others are doing.

Read more on NFT tickets in this extensive FAQ: https://faq.get-protocol.io/

Read the full letter here: https://grayscale.com/2022-h1-ceo-grayscale-investor-letter/