Matcha

All three of us love concerts! I mean who doesn’t? Anirudh is on a dance team, Nevan produces beats as a hobby, and Vishva just came back from the Keshi concert before ETHGlobal New York.

All three of us have gone to many concerts. But one thing we hate, and we’ve discovered many music fans hate is buying the tickets. There’s always concerns of getting scammed (which happened to Nevan’s friend once). Additionally, there’s always the frustration of having to buy tickets resold way higher than their original price. For example, a study by the National Independent Talent Organization (NITO) in the United States examined 65 different shows and found that ticket resellers consistently charged more than twice the face value, averaging a 203% increase over the original price.

During the Coldplay concerts in Mumbai, rapid sellouts via BookMyShow triggered unauthorized resales on third-party platforms at exorbitant prices—up to ₹85,000 (US$1,015). This prompted an Indian police investigation into massive scalping activity. It's clear from this incident that ticketing is a global issue in the entertainment sphere.

There has even been national outrage over the reselling of tickets. After the reselling disaster that occurred during Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2023, there were protests throughout the country trying to ban Ticketmaster for allowing this to happen. People are literally protesting over the ineffectiveness of concert ticket sales in America!

As college students studying CS, EE and Business at UPenn, we realized this problem could be addressed by bringing the concert industry on-chain — a solution that bridges our fields of study in tech and finance.

Matcha, our decentralized ticketing platform, tokenizes tickets as NFTs to create clear transparency and verifiability over who owns what ticket, preventing potential scams like the one that happened to Nevan’s friend. These NFTs are built on top of Flow blockchain, a consumer focused blockchain that will help bring the masses to our platform.

While NFTs solve most scamming issues that might occur with ticketing, we continued adding features to address scalping. For example, we have smart contract logic designed to limit the number of tickets someone can buy to up to ten and to split any reselling so that the artist gets some of the profits of these secondary sales.

One of the features we were inspired to develop after talking with Flow was gamification to reward true fans of artists. Almost like a proof-of-fanness, while also bringing some fun and competition to music. In our web app, artists can choose to reward fans who go to a certain number of concerts as gold-tier fans, giving them early access to buying tickets. While simple so far, we hope to build out these rewards / gamification features more robustly by introducing more tiers and other types of perks.

Additionally, we have some light anti-bot measures that we’ve integrated to further prevent scalping. We integrated ENS so that people can almost prove their realness by having a name to their wallet address. Additionally, we integrated with Privy, which requires authentication through email or text code confirmations, another way to stop bots. Privy is also really awesome because it allows to bring the masses, by abstracting the crypto and making it easy to on-ramp new non-crypto native concert-goers.

We’re very excited about what we built this hackathon because it's something so personal to us. Nevan has connections with DJs and musicians who have expressed their frustration to him about their ticketing platforms, which is why we see genuine market fit for the product. Because we three are based in the city of Philadelphia, we have easy access to raves and indie music venues that we’re interested in showing our platform to. Overall, this is a project that’s on the cutting edge of blockchain technology while having an amazing business case, and being of personal relevance to all three of us, which is why we hope you are just as excited as us about our project!

We built Matcha using the “FEP” tech stack: Flow, ENS, and Privy. We designed this tech stack to be suitable for web apps that are trying to be consumer-facing, because of the way these technologies seamlessly integrate with each other.

We deployed our contracts on Flow’s EVM runtime to take advantage of its consumer-grade scalability, low fees, and account abstraction. This allowed us to build with Solidity + Hardhat while still inheriting Flow’s high throughput, which is crucial for real-world ticket drops where thousands of fans purchase at once. Flow’s design also reduced onboarding friction, helping make Matcha feel like a mainstream app instead of a crypto prototype. To further smooth the user experience, we integrated Gelato Relay on Flow to enable gasless transactions. Using Flow-compatible relay infrastructure, users sign messages off-chain, which Gelato relay nodes submit on-chain while sponsoring the gas costs. This eliminated the need for users to hold native FLOW tokens, making ticket purchases feel seamless and lowering the barrier to entry, all while maintaining security and UX consistency for a fan first platform. Overall, Flow’s consumer oriented chain perfectly synchronizes with our consumer oriented brand and platform.

In Matcha, ENS is deeply integrated to transform raw Ethereum addresses into rich, verifiable identities. On the backend (ensUtils.js), we use ethers.js with Infura to perform reverse resolution (lookupAddress) so wallet addresses are displayed as human-readable ENS names, while forward resolution (resolveName) ensures those names map back to the original address, preventing spoofing. We also fetch text records like avatars, bios, and social links to build full ENS profiles. This data flows into the Web3Context on the frontend, making ENS names and avatars globally available. Furthermore, components such as WalletButton.js and EventCard.js consume this to display artists and users by name and logo instead of hex strings. By prioritizing ENS whenever possible and falling back gracefully to metadata/IPFS when unavailable, Matcha elevates identity from bare addresses to branded digital personas, adding usability, trust, and instant recognition that directly aligns with the goals of Matcha.

Privy powers Matcha’s onboarding layer by abstracting away the complexities of wallet setup, seed phrases, and network switching, enabling students to join with familiar Web2 logins like email, Google, or Twitter. We wrapped our frontend with PrivyProvider (configured with multiple login methods, embedded self-custodial wallets, and a forced defaultChain to Flow EVM BaseNet), so new users are automatically provisioned a wallet when they sign in. Using usePrivy and useWallets inside Web3Context, we bridge Privy’s session and wallet objects into ethers.js providers and signers, which drive all contract interactions. This integration underpins our custom gas sponsorship logic, letting Privy wallets sign transactions that Matcha pays for, making ticket purchases effectively gasless. On the UI side, components like WalletButton.js consume Privy state to show ENS-backed profiles or trigger login/logout flows. We even hacked around Privy’s injected styling with aggressive CSS overrides to match our dual-theme design. Privy helped us deliver secure self-custody with a Web2-like onboarding flow, a critical factor in making Matcha usable by non-crypto-native students.

We especially liked talking to Privy, who had some of the coolest technology. Getting exclusive access to play around with Privy’s native Gas Sponsorship feature (still in Beta) was probably one of the more exciting parts about the hackathon.

Furthermore, we used Hardhat to develop, test, and deploy our smart contracts, giving us a reliable local environment to simulate blockchain interactions before going live. It streamlined debugging and ensured our contracts behaved predictably across networks. We used Nora, the AI coding agent built for Solidity and infrastructure, as both a guide and accelerator in our development process. Nora helped us rapidly prototype, debug, and refine our smart contracts by reasoning about cross contract flows and low level semantics, which made building our ticketing system faster and safer. For our team, it was like having an expert Solidity co-pilot, which let us focus on architecture and design while Nora handled the heavy implementation.

Matcha represents a fully decentralized, fan-first ticketing platform built using the powerful FEP stack. By combining blockchain security, modern web frameworks, and careful design, it solves real problems for students and communities, prevents scalping, rewards loyalty, and supports artists and organizers in a sustainable ecosystem.