Jonas BouryImplementing NFC wallet at Celo Gather in Berlin
Wouldn't it be cool if your wristband at a conference or festival would let you earn points redeemable for exclusive swags? 😎
That's what we did last month in Berlin for the Celo Foundation Gather Conference.
Every attendee received an NFC wristband powered by the Citizen Wallet
They could earn points by posting on social media about the event, or sharing their feedback on the "Thoughts Wall", or finding hidden QR codes in various places of the venue.
It was incredible to see how most people played the game. Why would you still give away swags for free? People take them then throw them away. There is no attachment. But if they have to earn them, it's a very different story.
This experience was a great reminder of the power of the economic system to influence people's behavior.
It was a great experiment to create a micro-economy on an event where people also get a incentivize people to contribute to their community instead of just consuming.
The project
For Celo Gather, we’re developing a local event economy built on Celo that rewards visitors with Celo Community Points. These points can be earned and spent through different live event activators. Visitors will receive tokens at registration and can earn more through different activators, use them during the day, or save these points to buy exclusive Celo products.
How it worked
For all participants there was a menu list with options to earn and spend Celo Community tokens
People where very excited to really use web3 technology on web3 events which so far still has been missing a lot.
KiosK and point of sale
Once people collected enough tokens they could redeem them at the Celo shop for nice swag. 15 CeloC for a nice tshirt and for 40 CeloC you got youserlf a nice Sweatpants.
The Sales team of Celo could use our Kiosk app to select products that they wanted to charge and simply tap the wristband of the user to withdraw that amount.
Live transaction view
To give participants a clear few of what was happening on the blockchain we build an live transaction logger that.
It makes a nice ‘ksjing’ sound every time a new transaction comes in so that way the cashier also hears a clear confirmation that the transaction went through.
You can check out the live views for the Celo Community Points here. Make sure to change the date picker to 24 may 2024 to see all transactions.
Some statistics
All transaction happened on the public blockchain of Celo using the Celo Community point token.
You can explore all activity on Celoscan here: https://celoscan.io/address/0x3C960E72BBbD837293e75080E1d0Fee6a4640357
During the course of the event there were 761 transactions for a total value of 7,885.00 CeloC
And the best part, all of this only costed 0,98 in transaction fees using the Layer two blockchain of Celo. So we would say that is even less then the cost of hosting an own server to run such a system on Web2 technology, which definitetly is a huge breakthrough for web3 technology.
Public good wall donations
When participants left the event they had the option to donate their bracelet to one of the 3 collectives. That way the participants also had an incentive to recycle their bracelets so we can use them on next events.
Improved networking
For this event we also upgraded our web app to include a networking profile. So users could add a profile picture and social media details to the profile on their wristband. That way then could share their contact details by just tapping someone phone.
Room for improvements
While we are very happy with the results there definitely still is room for improvements.
The current reward system was still missing some automations, like automatic rewards for posting on Twitter/X and distributing the rewards for finding the NFT of the POAP hunt.
Our faucet contract should be improved to impose limitations on the number of claims each person can do for a certain challenge to avoid
So if you are interested to help us build reach out on discord.
Check out the aftermovie From Celo below.
Big Thanks to Luuk Weber and Niko da Costa Gomez for the opportunity and thanks to Kevin Sundar Raj, Jonas Boury and Bruno Roemers for all the work during the event to make this happen.
