Smart Token Labs working on Attestation based ticketing for Devcon
Today organizations often act as a gatekeeper for their community. For open communities, there must be a better way to authenticate community members, rather than making the organizers the gatekeepers of identity verification. This gives the ownership of their identity back to users and allows any service to authenticate the genuine membership of a person in a permissionless manner to provide services.
In the real world, identity cards such as passports serve this purpose of providing identity verification. However, in the current web2 world, we have to rely on organizations, often big tech companies, to provide this authentication as a service so that other services can verify identity and thus offer further services. However, with the power of blockchain and cryptography, there is a better way to provide authentication to genuine users in a permissionless decentralized manner.
Attestations are manifestations of the identity documents in the digital world. By using ticket attestations, Devcon — the largest Ethereum developer conference organized by Ethereum Foundation — is demonstrating how ticket holders can be permissionless verified by any applications or online services both onchain and offchain. This way third-party service providers can choose to provide exclusive deals or services to Devcon ticket holders, without depending on Devcon for participant verification.
This effort is based on Devcon Improvement Proposal (DIP) accepted by Devcon in response to the open RFP to experiment with onchain ticketing. The attestation based ticketing solution proposed by Smart Token Labs allows tickets to be used both on-chain and off-chain, by both traditional web services as well as smart contracts to authenticate genuine Devcon ticket holders. The ticket attestations are cryptographic claims made by entities, in this case, the Devcon team, that can be verified permissionless.
This allows the ticket to be used as an open integration point to provide services such as allowing users to mint ticket NFTs, granting access to service/DApp/event, to claim discounts in marketplaces, and more. Any interested party can verify authentic Devcon ticket holders, be it to create a private discord group or collect votes from genuine ticket holders. It can be thought of as akin to an open API owned and controlled by ticket-holding users. This allows all of the services to consume this service and build on top of the ticket holder verification.
Ticket attestations also allow Devcon users to choose the wallet address that they want to use, at the time of use rather than at the time of procurement of the proof. Devcon organizers would not need to know the wallet addresses to issue tickets, as the ticket attestations are sent over email or any other p2p messaging service in URL format, we call it a MagicLink.
What is the difference between attestation-based and NFT ticketing?
Compared with NFT-based tickets, attestation provides more flexibility, better privacy, lower cost, and can be easily converted into a blockchain token if needed. It provides most of the benefits of using NFT as tickets while removing some of the downsides associated with NFT tickets:
Smart Token Labs worked closely with the Devcon team to create the solution in a fully open source manner, ensuring that the solution is unbiased to any vendor or application. The MagicLinks were sent out to the participants of Liscon 2021, for the community to use and experiment with the ticket attestation. These MagicLinks were also used to conduct a hackathon in ETH Denver, in order to collect further ideas and feedback from the community. Suggestions and feedback from the community are encouraged and collected through the various code repositories in TokenScript GitHub, TokenScript Forums, or through Smart Token Labs’ Discord channels.
“Devcon should make use of as much Ethereum-based technology as possible, and we’re excited to be experimenting with cryptographic attestations to provide permissionless verification of who is truly a Devcon attendee. Gone are the days of us receiving requests for a list of names/emails of Devcon attendees (we never provided it anyway 😉). Now you, a Devcon attendee, can prove that you truly had a ticket without you or the Devcon team needing to share any personal information, thanks to cryptography and this new open standard.” said Skylar Weaver, Devcon Lead at Ethereum Foundation.
“Devcon is one of the most important events for the development of Ethereum-based technologies, as well as the Ethereum community. We are incredibly proud that we are able to play an integral role in it.” Victor Zhang, CEO of Smart Token Labs, said: “With advanced crypto technologies, we convert Devcon tickets into attestation, and it can work as an open API owned and controlled by the user, which enables an open market for service providers who are interested in providing services to Devcon users. With this type of token-centric framework, services integrate on the user side via tokens, and each user will have his/her fully integrated web, which can provide 100x better UX than web2. And service providers compete in an open market, which will further drive innovation and UX. Only this will drive the next 1 billion adoptions of web3.”
About Smart Token Labs
Smart Token Labs is creating a new standard for a tokenized future. Since 2017, it’s been building two core bridges to this future: AlphaWallet, a superuser agent for smart tokens, and TokenScript, the smart token interface for token composability. Built for a Web3 where tokens are as ubiquitous as web pages, TokenScript is a token-centric framework for building composable smart tokens for use cases across NFTs, PlayFi, DeFi, the metaverse, and the entire Web3 spectrum.
To follow the Smart Token Labs projects
- TokenScript Twitter: https://twitter.com/TokenScript
- AlphaWallet Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlphaWallet
