Block Party

Block Party runs on XRPL to permanently end secondary ticket markets. Scalpers are blocked, fans pay face value, and artists capture the true value of their work.

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Block Party

Inspiration

Besides a personal, undying hatred towards concert ticket scalpers, this project was heavily motivated by the technical depth -- the novelty and difficulty of building a real-world solution while implementing complex and uncharted technologies under the hood was a big intrigue. For better or for worse, we can't pass up a challenge.

What It Does

We have taken the most overdone, repetitive problem space in blockchain and completely flipped it on its head. Typical blockchain solutions for ticket resale only address one platform, letting scalpers easily resell elsewhere.

Block Party, with the help of brand new XRP tech, totally cuts off ticket transfers, only giving people the option to return their ticket for a 2% transaction fee. Once the ticket is returned, it goes to the next person on the waitlist, completely cutting out resellers.

If you want to know more about the technical implementations or specifics on how this logic stops reselling for good, check out the GitHub README and the attached demo!

How We Built It

Our team used TypeScript to create an SDK & frontend wrapper, making it easier to abstract the complexities of the XRPL away. We orchestrated multiple XRPL primitives, including:

  • Multi-Purpose Tokens for the tickets
  • RLUSD stablecoins for payments
  • Escrow accounts for the waitlist
  • Atomic Batches for transactions
  • Decentralized IDs for authentication
  • Many more!

We even ended up needing to host the XRPL repo locally rather than using the online version so that we could access experimental features!

Challenges We Ran Into

The length of the hackathon (plus the over-ambition of our project) made these 36-hours a marathon, not a sprint! With a lot of the features we used being so experimental, we ran into a handful of cases where things weren't compatible or we had absolutely zero clue what to do.

Reading the documentation thoroughly and consulting with the Ripple sponsors ended up being a lifeline for us. There were a few times where our whole team had to put down their AI agent of choice and gather around a whiteboard to try to figure out how things worked.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Since we're from Nebraska, we were super happy to have connected with so many amazing students, organizers, and industry sponsors from here in Kansas. We're also so proud of Block Party because it's something on the forefront of innovation that we truly feel can have an impact on the world.

What We Learned

Perhaps a better question is: what didn't we learn?

Seriously, though - outside of technical specifics or the typical stories about teamwork, we found that the most powerful lesson from this weekend was the mentality that you can tackle any problem, no matter how big. With persistence, you can break the challenge down into smaller and smaller pieces that you stay disciplined in conquering. For us, this is super important to practice as we look to go into careers in entrepreneurship and tech.

What's Next For Block Party

  • Sleep. At least 12 hours.
  • Take our local implementation of Hooks to the public testnet.
  • Clean up the SDK so that venues actually use something like this!

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