Powering a festival with blockchain tokens, it that possible?

YES, IT IS!

In the weekend of 19-22 July during the ‘Welcome to the Village’ (WTTV) festival more than 1000 volunteers, crew and artists purchased their beverages with the help of LoyalGarden’s blockchain platform. Probably the first festival in Europe (maybe world?) where payments were done using the blockchain.

Almost 10 000 transactions have been handled by our platform and passed over to the Rinkeby Network (Ethereum blockchain). This is probably one of the biggest and most intense use cases in the crypto world so far, considering it took place during a live event under mission critical and time pressing conditions.

And it was a big success!

BUT WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO LET MORE THAN 1.000 PEOPLE, WHO NEVER EXPERIENCED BLOCKCHAIN, USE IT SUCCESSFULLY?
First of all, you have to realize that most people do not care that something is or is not running on the Blockchain. They just want to make their purchase and that should be as quick and easy as possible. User experience is, therefore, more important than the technical or ideological aspects of the blockchain. No hassle with private keys or wallets that you need to download and maintain. No, just a wristband with a QR code where you can charge and collect tokens on using a scanner and no confirmation from the user-side other than showing your QR-code.

For the festival, it is nice that something runs on the Blockchain and possibly generates some publicity, but the most important thing is that it’s 24/7 available, safe and cheap.

It has to be fast. If you lose speed, you lose sales, people don’t like to wait.
That means we can not wait until a transaction is confirmed in the Blockchain, people would still wait for their purchase. Here, too, we had to make concessions in view of the current state of Blockchain technology and build a sophisticated solution that acts as a second layer to the Ethereum blockchain.

Besides operation speed, saving on bank transfer costs by using Blockchain tokens is an advantage. Many small transactions for one or two beers were done with tokens instead of individual debit card payments. Most of the time, tokens were bought in larger sums at once, which only costs the festival one fee payment.

Still, blockchain technology is untested and unproven at this scale, so doing the main festival was a step too far for now. Instead, the festival gave us the chance to run our payment system at the WTTV Backstage. A group of more than 1,000 volunteers, crew, and artists create a lot of traffic and thus gave us an exciting and solid test case. Big enough to seriously test the blockchain, in an environment that was still critical, but where small things are also allowed to go wrong to some extent.

PILOT DORP
Shortly before the festival we also got the chance to run a trial during DORP. DORP is the interdisciplinary innovation lab that starts a week before Welcome to the Village. In ten days, a group of 100 students and entrepreneurs devise, develop and test solutions to build a sustainable future. Innovative hard-working world improvers also like to get a beer in the evenings, so that gave us an excellent opportunity to warm up our solution for the WTTV Backstage.

The beauty of a group of people involved in innovation is they understand that not everything is perfect from the start, are patient and take the time to give detailed feedback.

The pilot that week has already yielded much more than what’s normally encountered during regular testing. We got good feedback on how to tweak the user flow a little bit to give a faster performance. Also, we found out that the mobile phones that were doing well during testing now were too slow because the festival is held in an area with bad internet performance. In a group of 100 people a scan that takes 1–2 seconds is still acceptable, but with more than ten times the people at the Backstage it’s not. Scanning must then be instant. So we bought better performing mobile phones before going to Backstage.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
Two weeks before the festival we received a call from a scientist. He wanted to write a scientific paper about a blockchain-solution being used during a live event. He was specifically interested in the scalability of the blockchain. Of course we agreed to do so. No matter the outcome we agreed that he could publish about the results. So it did give some extra pressure to succeed. But who cares if you’re already pushing boundaries as an entrepreneur?

During the weekend he took note of our technical setup, collected more than 150 surveys of users and sellers and has received a ton of data about the performance of our solution and the handling of transactions in the blockchain. We look forward to the results and will be happy to share them later on.

AND HOW ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND IT?
Since the end of 2017 LoyalGarden has a working app (IOS or Android) in which any community can create a token within 1–2 minutes. The tokens can be used to build and engage your community. The challenge for a community is to give the token value to its members. For some communities value lies simply in replacing the current plastic tokens with digital crypto tokens (like WTTV). For other communities, value comes with rewarding volunteers with tokens that they can spend for access to events. The value increases if the tokens can also be spent at other venues: a nice extra reward for volunteers which creates a network effect for the venues.

For the Welcome to the Village Backstage we created a WTTV Backstage token with our token generator. WTTV decided that volunteers, crew and artist should be rewarded with some first free tokens, so we then preloaded their QR-code wristbands.

For a fast user experience, we developed three features in our app that are only available for community leaders: a payment terminal for charging wristbands, a top-up terminal and a balance-check terminal.

On the back end we also had to take some measures to prevent ourselves from losing transactions in a blockchain fork or other weird stuff that comes with working on blockchain. The technical details will be described in the scientific paper that will be published later this year, so keep following us.

ISN’T IT EASIER TO USE A DATABASE INSTEAD OF BLOCKCHAIN FOR THIS USE-CASE?
Actually, right now it probably is. But then why do it on blockchain?

Well, blockchain already saves up to 50% of the iDeal costs compared to cashless systems and is far superior to plastic tokens in terms of workload and security and is far less error-prone. But besides that, we want to experience the blockchain. See how it works, which errors it gives. All to prepare us for the future. We are in it for the long term. And we foresee a future where we can facilitate festivals, other cultural organizations, and artists with different blockchain solutions that save them up to 50% on the costs of middlemen, generate a more fair and transparent income for artists and will give new opportunities to generate revenue. Festival tokens, ticketing and loyalty rewards used in a network of (local cultural) entrepreneurs can do this. And we can only build the best solutions if we understand our market, get feedback from customers and know what blockchain can and cannot do. And of course, by doing so we also hope to contribute to solving the issues blockchain now has.

THE RESULTS
At the selling peaks, our terminals handled up to 100 transactions an hour each. For customers and sellers, the performance was fast and easy. But we also got good feedback on how to tweak the user-flow to make it even faster.

In terms of blockchain performance it all went very smooth. We are confident that right now we are able to run a festival or live-event up to 5 000 people. Of course, we’ll work on improving it to scale even more.

And last but not least we also created a network-effect. People with left-over tokens are given the chance to redeem them into our app. They can spend them at pop venue Podium Asteriks to get access to a concert. So it doesn’t stop after the festival, it was just the start. The beat goes on!

PS: We (LoyalGarden) would like to get in touch with projects who have done or are about to do similar use-cases to exchange experiences. Please leave a message.