A screenshot from Eventum’s e-sports themed live event featuring the championship round from the E-Sports League’s One Katowice 2018.

Building an actual product is by far the most important part of an ICO. Too many hustlers are busy preaching how their startup ICO will change the world instead of spending their precious time building a solid, robust, secure, and scalable product on the blockchain. Neither a well-written white paper nor a gorgeous landing page will ever hold more weight than a working proof of concept.

Expanding on the article I published last week on the 3 decentralized mechanical turk ICO’s, I decided to take a closer look at the Eventum Alpha and try out their blockchain-built MVP for myself. The criteria for my assessment is as follows:

I. What makes the Eventum Alpha unique?

II. Ease of the Registration Process

III. Live Event & Use Case details

IV. User Experience

V. Feedback & Takeaways

I. What makes the Eventum Alpha unique?

For those who are not familiar with Eventum, they are a blockchain-based startup poised to collect and validate real-time data via API for application development purposes such as content moderation, fake news identification and reporting on live events. Eventum’s Alpha is meant to demonstrate how real-time data is collected and processed until consensus is reached.

Fundamental blockchain architecture: It is one of the few prototypes in its field that operates on an Ethereum smart contract. All test interactions are said to be kept on the smart contract, the rules of which dictate how many participants receive rewards for inputs aligning with the consensus algorithm. Validation nodes: The prototype not just collects data in real-time, but also validates human inputs as an event unfolds. Randomized validators (users) confirm entries and help generate a consensus before the data is exported out via API. Global accessibility: The platform is hosted on a web application that allows anyone, anywhere to sign up and register for live events and participate in real-time. Diverse use cases: Eventum is currently hosting several live events which mimic real life use cases across multiple industries. Registrants are able to sign up for a variety of live events including: identifying fake news, moderating inappropriate content and analyzing dynamic imaging for suspicious activity.

II. Registration

Signing up for the demo was as straightforward as it gets — it required 2 simple steps and took about 5 minutes to complete.

Step 1: The first step involved the installation of a MetaMask plugin via Google Chrome. The Chrome extension enables the browser to run Ethereum dApps and helps you manage your interactions on the smart contract. A more detailed guide on how to install MetaMask can be found here.

Step 2: The second step requires you to sign up to any one live event on the Alpha. Participants are incentivized to invite their friends and share the Alpha’s live events through a Bounty and Referral program.

III. The live event

Eventum is founded on the principle of being the first blockchain-based startup to operate real-time, well-vetted data exportation via API for the application development purposes listed above. The live event I registered for centered around reporting real-time statistics from the E-Sports League (ESL) One Katowice 2018 Major championship round featuring two teams playing Dota 2 and Counter-Strike Global Offensive. In particular, participants had to identify which characters in the game drew first blood and suffered the first fatality. More than 250 participants casted their vote, all of which were archived on the live event’s smart contract. Approximately half of all voters were rewarded with EVT tokens for their contributions in voting with the generated consensus.

IV. User Experience

After completing the live event, I found these 3 qualities to be particularly keen:

Emphasis on transparency: From the moment I logged into the event portal, it was evident that my interaction — and all other participant interactions — was being captured and verified by the Ethereum smart contract. The smart contract recognized my sign-in, added me to the event start list, captured voting and distributed rewards to participants who correctly voted in line with the consensus algorithm.

A screenshot that confirms my sign-in to the live event. The smart contract recognized my sign-in and added me to the event list.

All interactions listed above are documented in a transparent, chronological feed on the smart contract. These interactions are encrypted for security purposes.

A screenshot of the smart contract which captured all participant activity during the live event.

Real-time calculation & automation: Perhaps the most impressive part of the demo was witnessing the MVP’s capacity to absorb information in real-time, whether it was capturing all the sign-ins or monitoring voting data. Even though all inputs are calculated on the back-end, the front-end of the portal provides a glimpse into how all inputs are processed by validation nodes.

A screenshot of the validation nodes at work. The validation nodes will help the platform deliver a consensus before any data can be exported to a developer.

Equally as impressive was the MVP’s ability to automatically produce a report summarizing voter tally and consensus breakdown in the few minutes following the event’s conclusion.

A screenshot of the GUI that is published following the conclusion of the live event. The GUI provides a voter breakdown and establishes how many participants voted in line with the generated consensus.

User-friendly navigation: Once logged into the live event portal, the only action item required of me was to submit votes to 2 questions via drop-down menu. The portal layout, though basic, was easy to navigate and there was no doubt in my mind as to how to provide my inputs. Once these were submitted, the consensus build up and validation took care of itself instantaneously.

A screenshot of the main window in the live event portal. I was simply asked to select an option from 2 questions via drop-down menus.

V. Feedback and Key Takeaways:

While Eventum’s “tokenomics” have been well outlined in their literature, the live demo only demonstrates how platform participants receive EVT for contributing to the consensus algorithm. I would recommend future iterations of the MVP to present live events that exemplify the reward dispute phenomenon, the validation process, and the user reputation system in order to better showcase the token model.

That being said, the Alpha is certainly impressive. The MVP illustrates a well-thought out proof of concept that transcends several use cases and sits on top of a user-friendly, functional blockchain infrastructure. My participation in the live event gave me an appreciation for how the platform interacts with all its stakeholders in diverse scenarios. I commend them on “standing up” their narrative and look forward to more updates from the Eventum team!