Peekaboo

Peekaboo is a blind NFT auction built on Ethereum/Optimism. Bids are sealed using asymmetric encryption, where the secret key is revealed by solving a verifiable-delay function (VDF). The secret key is published on-chain to close the auction. This allows anyone to reveal all bids after the auction is closed. Only one reveal is required on-chain, which is to declare the winning bid. Our auction has a lower amortized cost and more seamless user-experience than existing NFT auctions. This is made possible by the novel 2021 TIDE Encryption Scheme, which we adapted to the EVM by decrypting in a smart contract.

We spent Friday night trying to figure out if it was even possible to adapt the TIDE encryption scheme to Ethereum, let alone in a single day. We had other ideas on how to use VDFs for auctions, but we really wanted to use TIDE. I'm super hyped that the whole thing came together, along with the demo we recorded. We intend to go live on Optimism soon - we successfully deployed to the the Optimism Goerli testnet and secured our ENS name for branding, peekaboodex.eth.