Over the last few months, we've been coordinating with the talented team over at 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 with proceeds donated to the Devcon Scholars Program taking place in the coming days. We have committed 100 tickets to the raffle and 50 to the auction this year, and we plan to extend the availability of on-chain ticketing options next year.

The raffle will begin at 5:00pm GMT on August 22. The link to both the raffle and the auction will be found at https://ethercards.devcon.org once the sale goes live.

Provably Fair Sale

Raffle: August 22-24

The provably fair sale will function 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 those who can claim their tickets.

In order to discourage people from submitting many transactions to increase their chances, 2% of each non-winning transaction will be withheld. This is to incentivize those with more funds to use the auction instead. In a subsequent post we'll outline a process through which the community can help to decide how best to put these proceeds to use to benefit the Ethereum ecosystem.

Non-winning transactions, less the 2% "sybil-resistance fee", will be refunded after the sale ends.

Ticket Auction

Bidding: Aug. 27-29 (Reveal: Aug. 30 - Sep. 2)

The auction is modeled after the ENS domain registration silent auction. Bids are submitted blind over a 48 hour period and must be revealed once the bidding period concludes. We chose this system to avoid potential bidding wars. After the close of the reveal period, any unrevealed bids are forfeited.

This year we wanted to create a diverse set of systems in order to increase resiliency in the ticketing process and demonstrate the power of Ethereum, and open source community projects. This is also an experiment meant to gauge the level of participation when the process requires direct interaction with on-chain mechanisms, versus one that gives users the option of fiat payments and paying through exchange addresses. We're excited to try out these two on-chain mechanisms as part of this diversification.

After these two sales, a final opportunity to score tickets will come in the form of an appeals round, in which any unredeemed builder, student and sponsor tickets will be redistributed via an online application process. We can't predict the quantity that will be available for appeals just yet, and they won't be distributed until just a month before the conference, so grab a ticket in the raffle or auction if you're able!