We are pleased to announce that the Hydro Events Marketplace v1.0 (beta) is now open for public testing.

What is the Hydro Events Marketplace?

An event platform is a great way to promote your event, get an idea of numbers, and guarantee attendance, while having all of your payment processing taken care of.

This multi-million dollar industry has traditionally been dominated by a few centralised services such as Eventbrite and Meetup, who charge millions of users huge fees for their services. We have now decided to disrupt this market area by creating a simple, low fee, platform where you have full control of your events.

To understand the cost savings, let’s first take a look at the fee schedule for a resident of the USA to list an event on Eventbrite.

Latest information from EventBrite as of 10th February 2020

As you can see there are significant costs layered across the EventBrite platform for anyone wanting to create and host an event.

These fees can easily be managed by larger events that can absorb the cost (losing a big cut of profits), or just pass the fee on to the attendees. Small, local events, however, such as book clubs and board game groups are impacted hardest by this fee structure. With expenses such as room rental, drinks, and prizes, they can only manage a small fee. With traditional systems, they will be paying in excess of 20% in fees, passed on directly to the attendees.

The organisers of small events simply cannot afford this.

The Hydro Events Marketplace removes this layered fee process and flat rate per ticket, thus making the process cheaper and more user friendly. What’s more, your attendees will never have to pay a booking fee.

What does it cost?

Sadly we cannot make it 100% feeless as there are costs involved in hosting the platform and keeping it running. Instead, we will keep costs as low as possible by having a simple, upfront, fee structure which will be a small percentage of each ticket sold and no other costs.

You can also create free events with no hosting fee.

Final fees will be announced after the testing period and will be guided by the feedback we receive.

How does it work?

The underlying tech for the Hydro Events Marketplace is the Ethereum blockchain. We understand that the mention of blockchain can sound daunting to some people, but the team is working hard to make this as accessible as possible. We are continually looking for new methods and inspiration to make our services more user friendly.

The use of blockchain technology is important for a few reasons;

It allows us to make the entire platform open-source so there is no centralised authority.

Anyone can create an event without giving personal details to a third party.

It allows your tickets to follow you around wherever you go, all tied to your digital identity.

You are free to exchange and transfer tickets to other users.

Your tickets are secured by blockchain technology.

What’s more, being open-source means that if you don’t like the official Project Hydro Marketplace, you can copy the code and build your own version. You can create event ticketing platforms for different niche markets, or test a new fee structure — the choice is yours.

What does testing involve?

The store is not live yet; it is on what is called the Rinkeby Testnet so we can test features, user experience, and receive feedback at no cost to the user. This means that although you can set up events, you can’t actually sell any tickets at the current time.

To test, you will need a web browser with Metamask installed (please note that the mobile store is not ready at time).. You can then set Metamask to the Rinkeby Network via the dropdown. You will also need some Rinkeby testnet Ethereum before getting free Hydro test tokens directly via the Events Marketplace.*

*We will be simplifying this process going forward; however, for testing purposes we have to use this method

Feedback

As part of this public beta we really need your feedback so please test the platform and share your feedback on bugs, usability, and features.

We look forward to receiving your feedback and pushing out the full platform as soon as possible.

If you want to chat you can find the team via one of our social channels: