Virtual platform BuzzCast was founded in March of 2020, along with numerous other event tech tools, to help organizers create engaging virtual events while everyone was stuck at home. Now, it’s making a move that most other players in the space have yet to make: integrating NFTs. NFTs have been blowing up in recent months, and the live events sector in particular has been experimenting with the technology for things like collectibles and ticketing.
BuzzCast, which has produced events for clients including The World Trade and Tourism Council and Uber, completed a $4.3 million seed funding round last month led by Ayre Ventures, which it will use to incorporate NFT technology into its event platform.
Ayre Ventures is a huge proponent of blockchain technology and is the world’s largest investor in the original Bitcoin Protocol (BSV) ecosystem. BuzzCast has chosen to build upon this technology due to its myriad benefits including strong security, low transactions costs, large block sizes, and scalability, all of which is necessary for features that BuzzCast is aiming to build out on its platform.
Ryan Byrne, Co-Founder and CEO of BuzzCast — who previously founded video content production company The Buzz Lab — notes that the NFT integration “was a perfect convergence of various factors that started back in 2019.” He explains that his two co-founders, Luke Peterson and Matthias Thoemmes, had developed a blockchain-based promotional tool for event hosts and sponsors prior to the pandemic and conducted several successful tests at live events.
“We also saw that one of the biggest challenges when it comes to the virtual event space is the ability to bring true value to event sponsors, who are a key component in funding many large events,” he says. “With the recent rapid growth and evolution of NFTs and its capabilities, we identified an opportunity to take everything we know to build a feature set that will enhance our current platform offering, and deliver new value to event organizers and hosts.”
Sponsor and exhibitor ROI has indeed been an ongoing issue with virtual and hybrid events, which in many cases have not been able to replicate the value of an onsite event. BuzzCast will leverage NFTs to enable hosts and sponsors to gamily the attendee experience in all formats.
“Hosts and sponsors will be able to drive behavior, reward visitors with prizes and incentives, and extend their interaction with guests before, during, and after the event,” says Byrne. “For example, by creating the NFT of a specific piece of event content — what we call the BuzzCast Cards — we have a collectible that also grants the owner of the Card access to the content long after the event has concluded.
He continues: “The sponsorship dollars have effectively created a branded asset that forms a lasting impression with collectors, and the collectors are in turn more likely to evangelize about the branded collectible.”
BuzzCast’s immediate focus will be on creating these types of utility driven NFTs that represent content and access, and when launched, organizers and sponsors will be able to choose how attendees collect the NFTs. For example, it may be by airdrop, or as a reward for meeting certain criteria. They will also be able to let attendees redeem the NFTs for other digital collectibles or rewards, such as discounted tickets.
However, Byrne notes that BuzzCast won’t stop there. “With NFTs and the power of blockchain, content is verifiable and every interaction or connection that occurs on the content can be irrefutably tracked,” he says. “In the not-so-distant future, we see an opportunity to provide the means for event organizers and sponsors to tokenize the event content and sell, share, or license with the world in a way that best suits them.”
Byrne and his team at BuzzCast wholeheartedly believe in the potential of blockchain tech to revolutionize the event world. “We believe that blockchain is a technology that is transformative,” he says. “At BuzzCast, we are leveraging the blockchain’s inherent properties of Transparency, Immutability, and Auditability to disrupt the events space by blurring the line between the virtual and real world.”
Byrne expects to launch the first of blockchain-enabled features in early Q2 and plans to progressively add more capabilities over the following months.