thedefiant.io
Today KYD Labs, a Solana-based ticket sourcing platform, announced the launch of TIX — a DeFi lending layer built for live event financing.
TIX will be integrated with KYD Labs, bringing a verifiable financing and settlement layer to its existing infrastructure.
KYD is DeFi’s largest ticket transfer platform, with more than $8 million in ticket sales, and $2 million in pre-existing financing across more than 300,000 tickets, according to the press release.
TIX looks to solve venues’ up front cost demand, and says it turns tickets into tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) “that replace opaque, ad-hoc loan agreements to fundamentally re-architect the economics of live event financing.”
The new settlement standard is meant to allow artists to sell their own tickets while venues source upfront capital from platform liquidity providers through DeFi automation. As KYD Labs wrote in an X post today, the move “enables artists and venues to tap into onchain liquidity on solana.”
Currently, KYD Labs hosts over a thousand shows a year for 600 “major touring artists,” including the likes of Robert Plant and Travis Scott.
Ahmed Nimale, Co-Founder and CEO of TIX and KYD Labs, said in a statement: “Ticketing companies are banks for artists and live events. This means they control the capital needed to operate while also dictating and inflating service fees which are actually interest rates placed on fans by ticketing companies from these capital deployments, as well as resale markets, exclusivity, and data access.”
KYD Labs raised over $7 million in May in a funding round led by a16z crypto Crypto Startup Accelerator.