Welcome to the Blocktix Quarterly Development Update for Q3 2018. We had quite an interesting 3rd Quarter with the Neverland Festival happening in the Netherlands and more recently the new Firebird Music Festival in Phoenix, Arizona. We ran pilots of the Blocktix ticketing system at both events, testing it in the real world. You can read about our first pilot here and we’ll talk about the second pilot right after our usual messages.
Social Media
As always, we invite everyone to keep up to date on our progress and to join the Blocktix conversation on our social media channels:
If you are not connected yet, we invite you to join our Discord server to explore the features of Blocktix, ask questions or just have a chat with other supporters.
Firebird Music Festival
On the 23rd of September our first ever USA based event took place in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was a great event with artists including Rick Braun, Jeffrey Osborne and of course our own advisor, Everette Harp.
Here are a few words from Everette:
“The first annual Firebird Music Festival was everything its organizers and patrons hoped it would be. With top tier, Grammy Award winning and nominated jazz artists filling out the lineup from top to bottom, and a great environment, Blocktix and JEMROCK Productions could not have hoped for a better kickoff for this first-year festival. The overwhelming reception by the fans that attended the festival, as well as the artists and their bands, confirmed that the overall experience was thought out and executed very well.
Blocktix and JEMROCK would like to thank co-hosts record producer and A.I. alum Randy Jackson, as well as TV actor and comedian Sinbad for making the first annual Firebird Music Festival a great success for all attendees. We all hope to see you at future Blocktix and JEMROCK events.
Many thanks to all involved!”
- Everette Harp
The Blocktix Pilot at Firebird Music Festival
We found improvements during the first Blocktix Pilot at the Neverland Festival and quickly developed the updates for the second pilot at Firebird Music Festival. The updates were made available for all iOS and Android users right before the event. Ryno (our lead developer) and Bojan were again at the gates to perform the pilot once more.
Here’s a few words from Ryno:
“The second Blocktix live pilot went really well and we were able to scan tickets rather quickly with the offchain scanning service in production.
It just so happened that Augur (REP) went live just before the Neverland event, so the Ethereum gas price was really high during the first pilot. This ultimately lead to us opting for off-chain ticket scanning, which works really well in production.
We have also been in the process of developing a mechanism to export tickets for an event, that will make them printable. This will give other event hosts the ability to sell or give away tickets through other means which helps increase adoption.”
- Ryno Mathee
Development of Blocktix
One of the most important Blocktix additions is the off-chain redemption system. As mentioned before, we are trying to circumvent expensive Ethereum gas prices. As it stands currently, high-capacity events on the Ethereum network can lead to high gas prices which in turns leads to problems when events would want to redeem their tickets on-chain.
That is the main reason we have opted for the off-chain redemption system as to be able to process tickets fast and without gas costs. The system is currently in beta and was first tested at the Firebird Music Festival.
We’ve also added timezone support for events. This prevents incorrect time data in the smart contracts and ensures tickets are redeemable from the moment the event organizer wants them to be.
The third addition is support for printed tickets. Although the world is mostly mobile now, we have seen many cases and reasons where printed tickets are the preferred choice for patrons.
The new update is available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
In Conclusion
Our second event and the second Blocktix pilot were a success. We have learned a lot with the system in production and are now getting ready for next steps, adding new Blocktix features and gearing up for more events in the near future.
