Honest Ticket Machine

Inspiration

Every creators nightmare is dealing with copyright. There are so many nuances and dire consequences even to those who unintentionally bring in content. Creators and brands are growing further apart as a result, the pace of creativity simply cannot be contained by the legal frameworks that brands use today to protect their content.

In the early days, Twitch and YouTube were platforms where creators could truly thrive. But as these platforms matured, they needed to comply with regulations and it began enacting harsh rules to all its users. This alienated or even destroyed careers of many creators. This was inevitable, having these rules retro-fitted at the end would not lead to the best outcome. We think a new approach is needed, one that factors in the legalities from the start.

What it does

The Honest Ticket Machine is an event ticketing platform that was built with content sharing from the ground-up. Using blockchain technology, we can eliminate the costly intermediaries to provide a faster, transparent and secure process to securing usage rights.

The platform currently supports a limited number of features. Creating ticketed events and linking them to “Universes”, which is our mechanism of attributing creative content. The platform will automate as much of the legal obligation as possible, with proper attribution and compensation built into the platform. This will free creators from having to worry about legal problems and simply focus on working within the platform to create their own experiences.

We hope that by providing these tools, we can support a new kind of creator economy where creators and brands can work closely together at scale.

How we built it

Everything runs on-chain on Dfinity as a small collection of canisters. The frontend canister services the static assets and the backend canister contains all the business logic.

We managed to fit our own preferred frontend pipeline into the asset canister, a testament to how flexible the dfinity tooling is. This allowed us to provide a rich user experience, with everything running on-chain.

The backend was simple, we kept everything in the canister and did very little outside it. There is room for more optimisation but we kept that out of scope of the hackathon.

Challenges we ran into

There were a number of challenges we ran into:

Couple of bugs sent us chasing red herrings, which took a lot of time. For example, the internet identity replica and mainnet had a bug where it couldn’t find the canister ID when visiting to authorize an app.
It was very easy to make transfers without the users consent, so we didn’t feel it would be safe to keep this functionality live. Ideally there would have been a built-in functionality on nnjs to let have users confirm their purchases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The small amount of time we took to bring this project to life, we only started in earnest 5 days ago. The maturity of the Dfinity ecosystem really helped in this regard.

What we learned

Dfinity and it’s tooling is really mature, although not perfect, it comes really close to the experience of working with platforms like AWS/Serverless for simple apps
A testnet is really useful to provide live demos that don’t cost real money
Having a local Internet Identity and Ledger running was like a godsend

What's next for Honest Ticket Machine

We have a few things on the agenda:

Optimise the app on the mainnet (there are a few bugs with Next.js and the IC behaviour)
Legal consultation with lawyers
Build more control over terms & clauses
Use open-source tools like https://accordproject.org/ or https://www.openattestation.com/ to strengthen the legal documents produced on the platform
Build a mobile app
Support FIAT currencies
Support assets apart from event tickets like digital artwork or physical merchandise