Hello, and welcome to our third Development Update. Over the past two weeks we have been quite busy again with the further development of our MVP amongst others. Next to that we also have a little update regarding the new upcoming website, but first:
Be Aware of Scammers
First off we really want to warn everyone on all the social channels, but especially on our community chatroom Slack, to really watch out for scamming attempts. Just this past week we’ve deleted over twenty different accounts that tried to send out scam messages or just looked fishy overall. We’ll keep scanning the signups actively for strange names and activity, doing our very best to keep the community safe.
Note the following guidelines:
1) Never click on any link from random people. Not in Slack, or any other social media. Also, never open any links you receive from our Slack in your private e-mail.
2) No-one on our team will ever ask you for your private keys. Always keep your private keys safe. We at Blocktix highly recommend using a Ledger Nano S or any other hardware wallet that keeps your private keys safe.
3) We also highly discourage anyone talking publicly about their holdings. In doing so you might open yourself up for more sophisticated attacks directed at gaining access to your personal portfolio. Be smart.
Our website upgrade
Over the past month we have been working together with a professional content writer to create a version of the Blocktix website for the general public. He went in without previous cryptocurrency experience, and looked at the idea of Blocktix with a fresh mind. We’ve now mostly concluded the content writing part of the update and have now moved on to the actual design of the webpage.
Structuring the process this way means that the designer has the future content available and can work with that in mind, making sure we don’t miss a beat in this department. We expect to finish up the design part of the new website before the next development update in about two weeks.
Development of Blocktix
After mapping out the user on-boarding process two weeks ago we’ve been mostly focused on the next steps in the process: how the actual event page looks, the process of buying tickets and the check-out process for users that wish to acquire tickets for the event(s) they want to attend.
Seen above is an example of a flow when a user wishes to acquire a ticket to an event, in this example the Belgian Beer Expo which we use as a placeholder. After you select the tickets you want you move over to the checkout process. Choosing whether you want to create a new wallet or use one already available on your system, then moving on to the payment portal, giving users the choice of payment per cryptocurrency or other options in the future (in this example credit card). After payment has taken place the confirmation page will be shown, where you have the option of viewing the tickets on the website or open them in your mobile app.
One of the challenges that presented itself during this process was how to integrate the light wallet as well as how Web3 detects whether you are running a light wallet, or a full node like geth or Parity.
We’ve also been looking at the performance differences between using Event Logs and using contract storage. Event Logs require the system to filter the block headers and this tends to be very slow as the client will have to pull all the blocks related to the event.
The option of contract storage is the better solution in this regard as you have access to the latest state which is the same conclusion we came to during our initial R&D phase.
However, both are pretty slow when we get above a certain number of events and would kill the user experience outright, so we opted for an indexed approach. There are several solutions available to reach the indexed approach, one being Elastic Ethereum. While promising, we ended up writing our own module that can run on a serverless service which will index the events periodically.
In Conclusion
As you can read we’ve been keeping ourselves quite busy over the past two weeks and currently we are already busy with our discovery process for the mechanisms on subjects like:
- Consensus / voting
- Blocktix registration contract
- Ticket business logic
More on that in the next update, for now we leave you with a first mockup of a the ‘My Tickets’ overview on the webapp and of course a first mockup of an actual Blocktix Ticket
