We are pleased to announce the release of the Aventus Ethereum-based ticketing solution’s alpha product on the Rinkeby public test net. Usage instructions below!
Trial the Aventus Alpha!
The alpha consists of scaled-back versions of:
- The event and ticket creation process (including creating both primary and secondary markets, and adding ticket validators to an event);
- The ticket purchasing process on primary markets;
- Both the ticket selling and bidding processes on secondary markets;
- And finally, the matching process (whereby bids on resold tickets are collapsed and a bid is chosen for the ticket).
An announcement next week Monday will be coming that details our first big event trial (2000–5000 attendees) later this year, which will use most of what was released in our alpha!
Note: as you will see in the usage instructions below, this alpha only works if you use MetaMask. The alpha is a completely decentralised application with no server. You pay for everything in testnet Ether/AVT.
If you have any problems with MetaMask, please check out our clickthrough instead; that shows the UI of most of the functionality in the alpha.
Disclaimer: the alpha is an internal version that was released publicly to show the community our progress and to get feedback and iterate. There will be bugs in the system, and we know that the Solidity smart contracts are not yet completely secure. The bug bounty for our token sale contracts here does not apply to the alpha.
Usage Instructions
- Download MetaMask for your browser. It works in Chrome.
- Once you have created your account, select the Rinkeby Testnet. You now have a test net account, but no test Ether. Next to your address, press the “copy” button to copy it into your clipboard.
- Visit https://www.rinkeby.io/ and click on “Crypto Faucet”. You will need a Github account to proceed. If you do not have one, please visit https://github.com and create an account.
- Once you have an account, create a Gist. Title it “Rinkeby” and in the text section, paste in your Rinkeby test net address.
- Create your public gist, and once you have done so copy its URL and paste it back into https://www.rinkeby.io/ > Crypto Faucet. Recommendation is to click “1 day” and receive 7.5 ETH.
- You will now be placed in a queue to receive test net Ether. You will need to wait a couple of minutes until the transaction is mined on the test net.
- Check your balance on MetaMask, and once you have your Ether, visit the Apha site and start playing around with the alpha!
- Please remember to submit transactions on MetaMask when processing (Loading).
Tips & Best Way to Test the System
For a full test of what the Aventus alpha has to offer, one should test:
- Creating an event. This involves creating the event details which are then uploaded to IPFS, creating tickets (with conditions on sale prices and secondary market resale price caps/event organiser fees), and adding validators (people who check IDs and tickets at the door). Tips: you will be able to validate whenever (we removed the condition that ensures that tickets are only validated and redeemed during the event so people could play with it easier), so the start time of the event does not matter. However, ensure that you make the ticket buy start time to be today; otherwise, you will not be able to buy tickets. Note: since the contracts have not been fully optimised the waiting time in creating an event (+ all tickets) is a few minutes long. This will not be the case in the beta version released later this year. But you can do other things whilst you wait, so long as you remember to keep clicking “accept” on the various transactions!
- Buying a ticket. This is very straightforward, but the important thing to note here is we require you to input your full name as part of our secure, black market eliminating solution.
- Selling a ticket. Simply select the ticket you would like to sell and the price at which you would like to sell it.
- Bidding on a ticket in the secondary market. Resold tickets are sold non-deterministically to secondary market buyers (“bidders”), and to facilitate this we have an “interval structure” here set to 2 minutes. When you sell a ticket, you must wait 2 minutes to place a bid on it. Once the ticket appears, you may bid.
- Matching a ticket. If you go back to your dashboard and click “match”, 2 minutes after your bid (for another 2 minute interval) you will be able to “match” the resold ticket (e.g. allocate it non-deterministically to one of the bids, in this case yours as it will probably be the only one). This will allocate you the ticket.
- Validating and redeeming a ticket. As stated previously, we took off the check of event start time for validating and redeeming a ticket so you could test this. To do this, use your smart phone to take a photo of the ticket on your dashboard, then navigate to the event page, click “validate”, and scan your ticket image from your phone. Then, type in your full name (which you entered upon purchasing the ticket), and redeem it. If you go back to your dashboard, your ticket should appear as redeemed.
Limitations, Improvements To Come
As stated previously, this alpha is a scaled-back version of the full protocol. Elements still to come:
- Bidding on multiple tickets
- Checks to ensure the same ID cannot exist for multiple tickets of the same category for a given event
- Voting processes around protocol parameters, fraudulent events, and fraudulent applications
- Our full non-deterministic secondary market matching process, which uses elements from proof of stake
- Ownership structures for events (e.g. artists, promoters, etc) and logic governing their associated payments.
- Various security improvements and bug fixes. Many security checks were dropped for this alpha to facilitate a better user experience when testing the existing features.
We invite you to give us your feedback, questions, or comments on our Slack. If you find any bugs, please also let us know, and we will address them as soon as possible. We know that there will be bugs as this is just an internal test version and not the final fully secure version.
We have a few announcements before our token sale next Wednesday so make sure you keep up to date with us!
