XP

XP is a Solana-based ticket resale marketplace that uses on-chain NFT encryption to cut out the hidden fees and fraud that define traditional secondary ticketing—offering buyers access to more than 34 million tickets across 110,000 live events in the United States and Canada at prices it claims run 20 to 30 percent below StubHub, Vivid Seats, and SeatGeek.

The Problem XP Is Solving

The live-event ticketing industry is dominated by a handful of intermediaries that layer fees on top of face-value prices. A $55 concert ticket can clear $80 at checkout; a $455 arena seat can exceed $1,000. A single major platform controls roughly 70 percent of US primary ticket sales, leaving fans with little recourse and no price transparency. XP was founded on the premise that blockchain settlement can remove the intermediary markup entirely—replacing opaque fee stacks with direct buyer-to-seller transactions visible on a public ledger.

How the Tamperproof Protocol Works

XP's core technical innovation is its proprietary Tamperproof protocol, which encrypts ticket claim codes inside a specialized NFT format called a tamperproof NFT (tpNFT). Each ticket on the platform exists in one of two on-chain states:

• Sealed: The tpNFT contains an unused, encrypted ticket code that remains inaccessible to both buyer and seller until the transaction settles. A sealed tpNFT is guaranteed to hold a valid, unused code, making it safe to list and transfer without risk of pre-disclosure fraud.
• Unsealed: Once the sale completes, the code is decrypted and made available to the end buyer, who then uses it to claim their ticket through normal venue channels.

The sealed/unsealed status updates immediately in Solana's on-chain metadata, giving every party real-time, verifiable proof of a ticket's state at any point in the transaction. This mechanism eliminates the two most common secondary-market scams: duplicate codes (the same code sold to multiple buyers) and depleted codes (codes already used by the seller before the transfer completes).

Solana as the Settlement Layer

Founder and CEO Mike Saunders selected Solana specifically for the economics and throughput demands of high-volume ticket sales. When a popular tour goes on sale, thousands of transactions can fire within seconds—a load that congests slower, costlier chains and pushes settlement fees up to levels that negate any savings on ticket price. Solana's low per-transaction fees mean XP can settle each tpNFT transfer without passing a meaningful on-chain cost to buyers or sellers. The chain's composable oracle services enable real-time market-value pricing, and its high-throughput architecture handles inventory management during demand spikes.

Payments are designed to be accessible to audiences with no prior crypto experience. Buyers can pay by credit card or USDC via a Solana wallet. The platform's interface mirrors familiar resale marketplaces, organized by event category (concerts, sports, comedy, theater) and searchable by artist, team, or city.

Platform Scale and Savings Claims

XP's inventory covers over 34 million tickets spanning more than 110,000 live events across North America. The platform positions itself as consistently 20 to 30 percent cheaper than comparable listings on major resale platforms, with an average saving of $61 per ticket. These figures are drawn from XP's own promotional materials and Solana Foundation coverage. The structural argument is straightforward: cutting the double-sided commissions that incumbents charge—typically 10 to 25 percent on each side of a resale transaction—should directly lower prices if those savings are passed through. XP's consumer protection offering, called the Quality XPerience Guarantee, is backed by 24/7 human support.

Funding and Team

XP raised $6.2 million in seed funding, led by Blockchange with participation from L1D and Reflexive. The capital is allocated toward expanding API integrations with upstream ticketing systems, building fan-centric features, and scaling real-time event processing infrastructure.

Mike Saunders, founder and CEO, brings prior exits to the role. He previously built a digital food ordering platform that was acquired by GrubHub and founded a technology development firm before turning his attention to ticketing. The model he is applying—peer-to-peer marketplace with blockchain-enforced authenticity—follows a similar playbook: remove the intermediary, lower the take rate, and compete on price and trust.

Ecosystem Position

XP is among the small number of Solana projects targeting mainstream consumer markets with a product that requires no crypto knowledge to use. Buyers interact with what looks and feels like a conventional resale site; Solana's role is invisible at the UX layer but central to the fraud-prevention and settlement architecture. The Solana Foundation has highlighted XP as a flagship consumer-facing use case, with a dedicated case study published in February 2024.

There is no native governance or utility token associated with XP. The platform does not require users to hold any cryptocurrency; USDC is supported as an optional payment rail alongside credit cards. The tpNFTs that represent individual tickets are settled or transferred at completion rather than retained as tradeable collector assets.

Competitive Context

XP competes directly with StubHub, Vivid Seats, and SeatGeek in the secondary market, and positions itself against Ticketmaster's primary-market dominance through transparent, all-in pricing. The North American live-event resale market generates tens of billions of dollars annually, and the incumbent platforms' fee structures—charging both buyers and sellers double-digit percentage commissions—represent the margin XP is targeting. The platform's domain migrated from xp.xyz to xp.tickets, which is the current active storefront, with support available via xpsupport.zendesk.com.