How SZA Brought 3,000 Fans Onchain with ITM Studio and thirdweb Engine.

ITM Studio has created a breakthrough in artist-fan engagement by building an onchain ticketing platform that seamlessly connects traditional event management with blockchain technology. When Grammy-winning artist SZA threw a surprise after-party, ITM brought 3,000 fans onchain to secure their access—demonstrating how web3 can enhance real-world experiences without introducing friction for mainstream users.

TL;DR: ITM Studio leveraged thirdweb's infrastructure to eliminate web3 friction while maintaining blockchain benefits, successfully processing thousands of ticket sales and bringing mainstream users onchain through SZA's surprise event announcement to 30+ million followers.

The SZA Moment: How 23 Million Followers Discovered Web3

SZA had just finished performing at Madison Square Garden when her team made a last-minute decision to throw a surprise after-party. Five minutes before the announcement, they contacted ITM Studio with an urgent request: they needed a complete event infrastructure deployed immediately for the impromptu event.

What happened next demonstrated the power of invisible web3 integration at scale.

The Announcement That Changed Everything

SZA blasted a single ITM link to her massive social media following:

• 23 million Instagram followers
• 8 million Twitter followers
• 1.1 million TikTok followers

The announcement was simple: an exclusive after-party for fans, with free RSVPs available through ITM's platform. But behind the scenes, every fan who claimed their RSVP was automatically issued a soulbound token, dropped directly into an embedded wallet they never knew they had.

3,000 Fans Onchain in Hours

The response was immediate and overwhelming. Within hours, 3,000 high-intent SZA fans had been brought onchain through ITM's seamless platform. These weren't crypto enthusiasts or web3 natives—they were mainstream music fans who simply wanted access to an exclusive event with their favorite artist.

As ITM noted on social media: "3000 high intent sza fans were brought onchain last night. Anyone can build on top of this permissionlessly. The reason consumer crypto sucks is there's not enough interesting data to play with that exists onchain beyond tokens. We're bringing real communities onchain. These are people you can build for that aren't interested in speculation."

Building Apps First, Blockchain Second

The SZA event illustrated a fundamental shift in web3 strategy. Rather than leading with blockchain technology, ITM built a superior event management experience that happened to be powered by onchain infrastructure. The result was a seamless experience where fans received real utility—access to an exclusive event—while unknowingly participating in the largest onchain music fan onboarding in history.

What is ITM Studio?

"ITM has basically become the fastest way to set up a pro experience end to end," explains Saarim Zaman, ITM Studio's founder. "Ticketing, check-ins, guest list, merch, content distribution, notifications, all of that."

ITM Studio operates on a simple yet elegant principle: all campaigns—whether digital or in-person events—are modeled as ERC-1155 tokens. Their platform creates soulbound keys that track the atomic unit of consumer interaction. When a fan purchases a ticket, they receive a key. These keys enable ITM to send "echoes"—content blocks that engage and retain audiences before, during, and after campaigns.

The keys maintain full interoperability with the broader web3 ecosystem precisely because they are standard NFTs. This allows artists to build custom experiences on top of the platform while maintaining the seamless user experience that traditional audiences expect.

Breaking Free from Closed Systems

Traditional event platforms create significant limitations for creators. "Right now the problem with any experiential product, whether that's like for in-person experiences or even digital experiences is most of them are closed systems," notes Zaman. "A lot of the times they don't give you the names or the email addresses or the phone numbers of your audience that you're bringing into the platform."

ITM fundamentally reimagines this model by treating every interaction as part of an ongoing relationship rather than isolated transactions. "We wanted to take the opposite approach. We believe in the power of open data. We believe in composable APIs. We believe in creating ecosystems on top of our data set."

Technical Architecture: Eliminating Web3 Friction

ITM's success stems from their strategic integration of thirdweb's infrastructure to remove traditional blockchain barriers while maintaining the benefits of onchain interactions.

Seamless Identity Management

ITM leverages thirdweb's In-App Wallet solution to eliminate wallet creation friction:

• No Crypto Knowledge Required: Fans can participate using existing social media credentials or email addresses
• Invisible Blockchain Interactions: The entire onchain process happens transparently without requiring users to understand crypto concepts
• Enterprise-Grade Security: thirdweb's audited security architecture protects fan data while maintaining simple authentication flows

This approach removes the most significant barrier to mainstream web3 adoption—the requirement for users to understand wallet creation, seed phrases, or private key management.

Explore In-App Wallets

Engine-Powered Backend Operations

ITM utilizes thirdweb Engine to handle all backend blockchain operations with sophisticated architecture designed for scale.

"We have a very, very sophisticated event-driven architecture pipeline," explains Zaman. "Third web engine is kind of core to a lot of things we do. We have a lot of queues so that whenever we're sending things to engine, they're happening at a steady rate because we are not trying to block the point of access or the point of purchase."

This approach ensures:

• Automatic Token Distribution: When fans purchase tickets, the system automatically mints and distributes access keys without manual intervention
• Scalable Transaction Processing: Engine handles high-volume ticket sales without performance degradation
• Non-Blocking Architecture: Token distribution happens asynchronously, ensuring the purchase experience remains smooth

"We've adopted this very event driven architecture that doesn't actually issue the tokens at the point of purchase and blocks the purchase from happening until the token is issued, but actually defers that to third web engine and then engine slowly distributes those tokens over time," Zaman details.

Learn More About Engine

Building Composable Fan Data

ITM's innovative approach creates valuable onchain primitives for developers. "On ITM today, every single event that's public is represented on chain every time you RSVP, soulbound tokens are issued and dropped in people's embedded wallets," says Zaman.

This creates unprecedented opportunities: "This allows developers from day one to be able to build on top of this data set. We have a couple of people who were really invigorated by the SZA moment to essentially try to build like new fan experiences on top of our data set."

The platform also issues ERC20 tokens representing network membership: "Every time someone checks in to an event on ITM or RSVPs, we drop these soulbound ERC20 tokens that kind of represents your membership or your rank in the ITM network."

The SZA Success Story: Mainstream Adoption in Action

The SZA event perfectly demonstrated ITM's value proposition for spontaneous, high-stakes events. "She wanted to do a last minute experience. This is kind of the new meta for a lot of artists. They want to be in the moment. They want to spin something up," Zaman explains.

Why Artists Choose ITM Over Traditional Platforms

"This is something obviously other platforms, either you have to be in touch with for a really long time with the platform, or it just doesn't have the robust suite of tools that you need to throw up a pro experience in the moment," notes Zaman.

The venue's choice reflected this reality: "They have relationships with all of the ticketing RSVP providers. And that was kind of just the one that they thought would work best in that, you know, kind of last minute setting up the whole stack from scratch."

Scale and Impact

• 3,000 fans brought onchain in a matter of hours
• 25-27 million followers reached via SZA's Instagram announcement
• 8 million followers notified through Twitter
• Additional reach through TikTok and other platforms

"She blasted it out to like her like 27 or 25 million Instagram followers and her 8 million Twitter followers and TikTok and stuff," Zaman recalls. "Reviewing the content that came out of that, it seemed like there's a mix of like a lot of celebrities, a lot of fans. It was really, really overwhelmingly positive. Like it really made the rounds on social."

Solving Real Business Problems with Web3

Revolutionizing Customer Acquisition

ITM addresses a fundamental challenge in the experience economy. "Right now the way any experiential creator, whether you're a brand, you're a artist, you're a musician, you're a venue, you rely on Instagram ads to acquire your customers," Zaman explains.

Their onchain loyalty system creates new possibilities: "What if at every single touch point, whether that's at the time of RSVPing or at the time of checking in, the brand is able to tell how active is this person in the network."

This enables sophisticated customer intelligence: "This is someone I might have never seen before. This person doesn't follow me on anything, but they are a top 1% user based on their token holdings on the ITM network. Maybe I'll give them a discount or other incentives to bring them into my customer base."

Building Unified Customer Profiles

"These media brands are all constantly repurchasing access to their own audiences," Zaman points out. "They don't have unified customer profiles across all of these touch points. Spotify knows what you're listening to on Spotify. Maybe Eventbrite or Ticketmaster knows what events you're going to, but there's no connection between any of these things."

ITM's vision addresses this fragmentation: "We want to become the central place where you can essentially be able to answer questions like who are my fans or who are my customers."

Lessons for Web3 Adoption

Hiding Complexity While Delivering Value

ITM learned crucial lessons about mainstream adoption. "When we started this project, we took a much more crypto native approach. We have realized since then how difficult it is to convince real people outside of the crypto spaces of the benefits of crypto and they associate it with unnecessary friction."

Their solution was strategic abstraction: "To kind of abstract away a lot of these things, even the way we describe the data that is on chain, we use the language of like, these are archives, that you can build on top of. Things like that have made it possible and not scared away anyone essentially from the project."

The results speak for themselves: "We are working with some of the biggest artists, some of the biggest brands, some of the biggest labels, some of biggest and most successful managers in New York. And no one has batted an eye about our infrastructure or whether this is a crypto project."

Creating Valuable Onchain Primitives

"We really think we need more interesting data on chain to play with. We wish we had more interesting data on chain ourselves," Zaman reflects. "The first step of that is really pushing more interesting data on chain beyond just financialized primitives."

This creates new opportunities for developers: "Even something as simple as putting these intents of RSVPs or tickets on chain means that you as a developer can essentially build on top of that data set, integrate the embedded wallet, build on top of that data set, create a fan experience, create a group chat for every single event on ITM."

Future Vision: The Experience Economy Operating System

ITM's expansion strategy focuses on building comprehensive audience intelligence. "For us, we've done really well in New York City. We work across museums, nightlife, fashion brands. We're going city by city as expansion strategies."

Their technical vision leverages advanced AI capabilities: "What everyone wants is better audience intelligence tools around who are their customers, where are they coming from, what are their profiles, what are their behaviors like, what are their user journeys like. And we are trying to use LLMs and stack LLMs on top of each other and build these swarms and really try to deliver that value back to all of our users."

Conclusion: Web3 Meets Mainstream Entertainment

ITM Studio's integration with thirdweb demonstrates how thoughtful infrastructure choices can bring blockchain benefits to mainstream audiences without friction. By processing SZA's surprise event announcement to 30+ million followers and successfully bringing 3,000 fans onchain, ITM proved that web3 technology can enhance rather than complicate real-world experiences.

As Zaman emphasizes, their success comes from focusing on real value rather than technology evangelism: "Our go-to-market is not tech people. It's not crypto native people. It is like brands and artists and creators and managers and labels who are all doing things in the real world."

The platform creates a template for web3 adoption: build valuable onchain primitives that developers can compose, abstract away blockchain complexity, and focus relentlessly on solving real business problems. Using thirdweb's In-App Wallets, Engine, and comprehensive infrastructure, ITM created a seamless bridge between traditional event management and blockchain-enabled fan engagement.

Similar success stories demonstrate the power of thirdweb's infrastructure. MYRIAD achieved 415K users in 30 days by eliminating web3 friction, while Last Memories reached #1 in app stores with seamless onboarding powered by thirdweb Connect.

Ready to build the next breakthrough web3 application? Get started with thirdweb's infrastructure and join the developers creating seamless blockchain experiences for mainstream audiences.