A single-user electronic ticketing system using ERC-721 protocol for smart contracts

Abstract

Single-user electronic ticketing systems face significant security challenges, including fraud and counterfeiting. While blockchain has been explored for electronic ticketing, existing solutions often remain centralized or focus solely on event-based scenarios, not single-user tickets such as flight, train, bus, big transport schemes, movie tickets, and vouchers. This paper presents a decentralized single-user ticketing system to address this gap by utilizing Ethereum's ERC-721 standard for smart contracts (SC). Transparency and privacy are ensured through asymmetric encryption. Digital signatures validate ticket authenticity, and an innovative ERC-721-based verification process is applied. Leveraging Ethereum's ERC-721 Protocols, digital signatures, and the interplanetary file system (IPFS) for decentralized metadata storage, this paper addresses centralization, security, traceability, and transparency concerns. The SC is integrated into a web application, and empirical analysis based on blockchain metrics demonstrates its performance. Results indicate that the system exhibits an efficient ticket transaction completion time of 19.64 seconds and a mean ticket verification time of 3.17 seconds. The outcome illustrates the efficiency of the system in mitigating fraud, counterfeiting, and security risks in single-user electronic ticketing systems.