In recent months, we have been coordinating with the talented team of ether.cards to bring an NFT-based on-chain ticketing solution to the Ethereum community in time for Devcon5.
This experiment will take place in two parts, with a raffle and an auction whose proceeds will be donated to the Devcon Fellows Program taking place in the next few days. We have committed 100 raffle tickets and 50 auction tickets this year, and plan to expand the availability of chain ticketing options next year.
The draw will start at 5:00 pm GMT on the 22nd of August. The link to both the raffle and the auction will be found at https://ethercards.devcon.org once the sale is activated.
demonstrably fair sale
Draw: August 22-24
The provably fair sale will work like a raffle: anyone can submit a transaction at any time during the two-day sale. After the end of a 48-hour window, the system will reveal who can claim their tickets.
In order to discourage people from submitting too many trades to increase their chances, 2% will be withheld from each non-winning trade. This is to incentivize those with more funds to use the auction instead. In a later post, we will describe a process through which the community can help decide how best to use this revenue to benefit the Ethereum ecosystem.
Non-winning transactions, less the 2% “Sybil’s Endurance Fee”, will be refunded after the sale is complete.
ticket auction
Bidding: August 27-29 (Reveal: August 30 – September 2)
The auction is modeled after the ENS domain registration silent auction. Bids are submitted blindly during a 48-hour period and must be revealed after the bidding period concludes. We chose this system to avoid potential bidding wars. After the close of the disclosure period, all undisclosed offers will be forfeited.
This year we wanted to create a diverse set of systems for increase resilience in the ticketing process and demonstrate the power of Ethereum and open source community projects. This is also an experiment intended to gauge the level of engagement when the process requires direct interaction with on-chain mechanisms, versus one that gives users the option of fiat payments and payments via exchange addresses. We are excited to test these two on-chain mechanisms as part of this diversification.
Following these two sales, a final ticket opportunity will present itself in the form of a round of appeals, in which unredeemed Builder, Student and Patron tickets will be redistributed through an online application process. We can’t yet predict the amount that will be available for appeals, and they won’t be distributed until just a month before the conference, so grab a raffle or auction ticket if you can!
