Proof-based ticketing service: greater flexibility and better protection of user privacy
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Proof-based ticketing service: greater flexibility and better protection of user privacy
Smart Token Labs developed a proof-based attestation ticketing service for Devcon.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
Smart Token Labs has developed an attestation-based ticketing service for Devcon.
To date, community organizers have acted as "gatekeepers" of their communities. Particularly for publicly open communities, there is an urgent need to find a better way to authenticate members—moving away from relying on core team members to verify identities of new participants. Instead, this approach returns ownership of identity verification to users themselves, enabling all services within a community to validate membership without requiring authorization from central administrators, thus creating more efficient and convenient experiences.
In everyday life, documents such as passports serve as identity credentials. In today’s Web2 world, we typically depend on centralized organizations—usually large internet or technology companies—to provide identity authentication services, allowing us to access various platforms without repeated verification. However, with advances in blockchain and cryptography, a better alternative exists: decentralized, permissionless methods that empower users with self-sovereign identity verification.
Attestations are the digital representation of personal identity (DID) in the digital world. By using ticket attestations, Devcon—the largest Ethereum developer conference organized by the Ethereum Foundation—can enable permissionless identity verification both on-chain and off-chain across apps and online services. Additionally, third-party service providers can leverage these attestations to efficiently offer special deals or services to Devcon attendees without needing Devcon to re-verify participant identities.
The ticket attestation service I described above builds upon the Devcon Improvement Proposal (DIP), which emerged from Devcon's response to a closed RFP calling for experiments in on-chain ticketing. The attestation-based ticketing solution proposed by Smart Token Labs not only enables tickets to be used on-chain but also supports off-chain usage—truly verifying Devcon attendance through a hybrid model combining traditional web services with smart contracts. Ticket attestations act as cryptographic proofs tied to each entity (note: entities could be individuals or wallet addresses), allowing the Devcon team to easily verify holder identities without official approval or direct oversight.
With attestation-based ticketing, tickets become fully open-source nodes providing user-facing services—such as minting ticket NFTs, granting access rights to different services/DApps/events, or claiming discounts on linked on-chain or off-chain marketplaces. Moreover, any interested party can view or verify the identity of Devcon ticket holders based on public data, enabling the creation of targeted Discord communities or organizing polls among attendees. Simply put, the ticketing system functions as a fully open API owned and controlled by users who hold specific tickets, fundamentally enabling diverse services to build applications once a holder's identity has been verified.
If the above hasn't fully conveyed the benefits of ticket attestations, here’s something important for users to understand: ticket attestations allow Devcon attendees to choose their preferred wallet address when using services, rather than locking them into a single wallet at time of purchase (i.e., self-custody of ownership). Furthermore, Devcon organizers can issue event tickets without collecting attendees’ wallet addresses at all—since attestations can be delivered via email or peer-to-peer messaging as URLs, what we call MagicLink.
You might now wonder: What’s the difference between attestation-based ticketing and NFT-based ticketing?
Compared to NFT-based ticketing, attestation-based ticketing offers greater flexibility, enhanced privacy protection for users, lower issuance costs for event organizers, and easier conversion of tickets into on-chain tokens. Thus, it retains the advantages of NFT tickets while eliminating several drawbacks associated with them.
Comparison chart of NFT ticketing vs. attestation-based ticketing
Smart Token Labs collaborated closely with the Devcon team to create an open-source attestation-based ticketing solution, ensuring its applicability across both on-chain and off-chain service providers. MagicLinks will be sent to participants of Liscon 2021, providing attestations usable for the hackathon held at ETH Denver, helping organizers gather authentic community feedback. The Smart Token Labs team welcomes suggestions and input from various communities—we invite you to leave feedback via code repositories on TokenScript GitHub, the TokenScript forum, or our Discord community.
"Devcon should fully leverage Ethereum's inherent technical strengths. We're excited to collaborate with ecosystem partners to experiment with cryptographically-backed attestation services, delivering seamless, permissionless verification for attendees. This marks the end of receiving endless lists of Devcon attendee names and emails (though we never asked for them anyway, jk😉). Now, as a Devcon participant, you can prove your identity without sharing any personal information—thanks to cryptography and this new open standard." —Skylar Weaver, Head of Devcon at the Ethereum Foundation.
Devcon is one of the core technical events and most important gatherings in the Ethereum community. We at Smart Token Labs are incredibly proud to play a vital role in this effort," said Victor Zhang, CEO of Smart Token Labs. "Using advanced cryptographic techniques, we've transformed Devcon tickets into attestations—open APIs owned and controlled by users—that integrate service providers into a more open and transparent marketplace. By building this token-centric framework, services can be seamlessly integrated on the user side, ensuring every individual enjoys a personalized, unified digital experience that feels 100x smoother than Web2. Service providers can compete fairly in an open market, driving healthy innovation and superior user experiences. Ultimately, this paves the way for the next billion-user Web3 application."
About Smart Token Labs
Smart Token Labs is building a new standard for a tokenized future. Since 2017, it has focused on developing two key bridges toward a Web3 future. AlphaWallet is Smart Token Labs' flagship user-facing application, while TokenScript serves as the middleware layer enabling composability for smart tokens. TokenScript is a token-centric technical framework designed to support widespread Web3 adoption, enabling composable smart tokens for use cases across NFTs, PlayFi, DeFi, metaverse, and the broader Web3 landscape.
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