Tackling Unauthorized Ticket Resales with zkSNARKs

The Problem

Unauthorized resale of tickets for high-demand and high-profile events, commonly referred to as black markets, has become a significant challenge:

• These black markets harm honest consumers by inflating prices and reducing accessibility.
• Event organizers suffer due to loss of control over ticket distribution and revenue.

Our Solution

Inspired by this growing issue, our app leverages the power of Zero Knowledge Proofs (zkSNARKs) to combat unauthorized resale.

• Core Idea: Bind tickets to the buyer's identity to prevent resale.
• Tailored specifically for high-demand and high-value events.

How It Works

1. Login-less Ticket Purchase System
   Buyers interact with a system that does not require traditional logins.

2. Identity-Based Enforcement
   Tickets are tied to the buyer’s identity through:

   • Aadhar (or equivalent)
   • Credit card details (e.g., CVV and card number)

3. Resale Prevention

   • Sharing or reselling tickets would expose sensitive identity details.
   • This ensures strong enforcement against unauthorized transfers.

Selling points

• Login-less authentication: zKonnect offers loginless-authentication by doing away with conventional methods of centralized login.
• High-Security: All the compute during ticket verification is on-device and no information leaves the device ensuring privacy at the highest scale.
• Broad Applicability: Suitable for any event requiring robust privacy and security measures.

Vision

This system ensures a secure and transparent ticketing experience while preserving user privacy, addressing the pain points of the modern ticketing ecosystem.

The project went of to a smooth start with everyone aware of each other's roles. We began with a basic framework of the application. We split the work into frontend, smart contracts and backend (including Wallet Payment Integration). A majority of our work was focused on implementing the Zero Knowledge Proofs which make use of complex mathematical circuits to implement the concept of zkSNARKS. This was a very challenging aspect of the project as we had to make it our task to understand and implement these complex blockchain and cryptography concepts. This challenge was also complemented by the implementation of smart contracts on the Polygon zkEVM testnet, as we had to ensure that all test-cases could be addressed and ensuring a seamless user experience overall.

Integration of the features was also another challenge we faced as we had to trust in our teammates abilites to ensure that the integration of all the features were executed perfectly. This led to minor drawbacks but was overcome after long hours of debugging.