I will attempt to explain a bit about our hack we worked on last weekend in Denver.
When observing the traditional model of event planning we find it usually focuses on finding the location, announcing it, and then marketing/selling the tickets after. Before the weekend started we wondered as a team how we could refine this funding model by harnessing smart contracts to ensure event organizers let their fans “put their money where there mouth is”
Our Chainlink integration harnesses smart contracts, staking methods and PGP signatures to accomplish an inversion of control by allowing cities who want a public event hosting monetarily incentivized via having trustless, immutable and autonomous contracts. The in this solution lies in our Chainlink integration. We have developed a system for verifying PGP signatures in a decentralized manner harnessing the Keybase platform. Although these contracts are hosted within the , external verification of fund claimers is enabled by using the node network provided by Chainlink to agree on the signed signature the artist puts forth, allowing them to receive the payout for the crowdfund they initiated.
In other words, imagine you’re a music artist who wants a more efficient process to analyze the density and location of fans with their funds globally. This takes place within a two-phase filtering process. The first phase aims to create a minimum buffer to filter between which cities are most likely to provide the highest funding results before allowing fans to commit. This is done for the sake of minimizing the waste of resources in terms of time and money. By harnessing the Twitter API, we establish a threshold of retweets based off of location data needed to find the subset of cities eligible for the next stage. Once a specified threshold defined in tweets for each location has been met such as 3,000 tweets with #<X> hashtag, they are now eligible for the aforementioned crowdfunding stage, Phase 2. This is where the fans of each Phase 2 eligible city can proceed to put their stake into the crowdfunding contract.
Phase 2 now generates a smart contract () for each city, this contract acts as a secure virtual money pool to house the funds. For example, if the artist stipulates they need a 1 million dollar commitment, a unique address of this contract is generated for each city and you as a fan can now send in your amount to commit to the crowdfunding of the specific city you want to have selected.
As an artist, the issue lies in claiming ownership and receiving the money in the winning cities contract. We need to prove the specific identity of this automated contract. For this to occur, we insert a Keybase username into the contract at its deployment time. A fan should not be able to impersonate the contract/pool owner and claim the money as theirs.
This is where PGP signatures arrive. When the smart contract is created the artist’s Keybase username is attached, Keybase.io allows signature verification of messages based on a provided username. Chainlink’s node operators now process this artists identity by fetching the public key of the required Keybase user via their username, followed by verifying and agreeing if the signature presented by the artist correlates with the previously fetched public key from Keybase. Once this verification has completed, the node operators forward their conclusion to the smart contract. This, in turn, triggers a fund release to the respective party and releases the funds back to the initial contributors within other city centers who did not win the event.
This crowdfund solution reduces much of the overhead/middleman involvement of bringing an event to a city. Selling a ticket could be guaranteed and marketing departments may have much of their efforts cut out for them since the funding will already have been secured. As an event organizer I now know for sure there’s true commitment for any event I’m planning on holding.
I suspect contracts built upon determinism and asset transference will make waves in the future. The birth of virtual contracts is upon us and to be involved in demonstrating just one use of the oracle network proposed by Chainlink is truly fascinating. The use cases really are endless.
Published at Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:08:32 +0000
