Underground dance parties are being organized via blockchain, with attendees mining crypto to unlock secret locations and avoid the cops.

The rave scene began in England in the late 80s and early 90s as a totally underground movement – ravers would ring a phone number a few hours before an event to find the location of whichever warehouse was illegally being occupied that night.

These days, the internet and social media have made communication increasingly accessible, but privacy has gone out the window and you never know who is eavesdropping.

In an undeniably fascinating development, European and US ravers are turning to communal crypto mining to fund underground dance parties.

It’s not so much peer to peer networking, as friend to friend.

The process of mining Monero not only helps pay for the events, but it also thwarts the efforts of police to monitor electronic communications and shut down the events.

That is, unless the police have a day to spare and don’t mind mining an untraceable privacy coin that helps pay for the event they ostensibly want to close.

Decentralised Autonomous Rave Scene

So far there have been almost a dozen events worldwide, including in Basel, Zurich, Barcelona, Athens, the San Francisco Bay area, Moscow and Berlin.

“The benefit of integrating this technology with a rave is that it has funded them to set up private raves, giving new life to underground scenes,” one of the organizers of the Omsk Social Club’s CryptoRave parties said in an anonymous interview with from Cadence Culture recently.

“The organization can keep its identity and location hidden and the event is only open to those who are deemed trustworthy.

“Visitors get encrypted invites, which makes it hard for outsiders to get access.”

How the whole thing works

Organisers send out links and wannabe ravers simply have to click on the link to head to the Rave Enabler website to start the mining process.

Attendees need to mine Monero for 11 hours to get a QR coded ticket along with information about the line-up, the secret location, and their new raver identity.

What’s a raver identity then?

The Omsky Social Club event integrates Live Action Role Play into the parties, with each raver assigned an identity they can research and play.

The identity also keeps them anonymous at the event.

“This new identity is theirs for the evening, in order to play it they must naturally research it, body it, dress it and enjoy it,” the event organizer said.

First-person story

Breaker Mag’s Liam Kelly attended CryptoRave 9 in Athens Greece, assuming the identity of Ruby Lipton, a fictional Monero developer.

He boned up on the history of Monero on the plane over.

“To make things more intriguing, my character has a back-story.

“An undercover cop has been asking Ruby for information on black hat hackers who are supposed to be at the rave. I’m told I will be rewarded handsomely if I can dig up a few names and clues.”

As it happened, he dug up precisely zero names or clues, but seemed to have a good time anyway.

“As far as raves go, this one checks all the boxes,” he said.