BidDAO

This project was inspired by the ConstituionDAO and its bid in the Sotheby's auction in 2021. Our idea is to solve two problems from that - namely that total bid amount was public signaling to others what is required to win and early participants didn't have recourse if the project raised more funds than they thought it was worth. To solve this, bidders encrypt their bids and include a maximum clearing price above which their bid will not count. This format provides some additional benefits. Unlike other sealed bid auctions, these bidders have no reveal step, and therefore only need to send their bid and that's it. At any time after settlement they can withdraw their winning tokens and/or ETH refund. In a similar way, the seller receives instant access to the funds when it has closed. Additionally, this approach lets the auctioneers have a "view" period if required, and this would enables bidding on behalf of the group in a separate market like an auction house while the bids remains encrypted on chain

We use an n-of-n distributed key, generated among a set of auctioneers to establish our encryption/decryption keys. Once the auctioneer public keys are published on chain, bidding can begin. Bidders generate their own ECDSA key pairs to form a symmetric key via ECDH. Their public key is included in the bid and after submission their key can be discarded. Once the auctioneer private keys are published, bidding is complete and the decryption & settlement begins. Settlement can leverage a submission, challenge, and response period or a direct posting of bids in a particular order (i.e. by descending max price) which results in a final result getting aggregated on chain directly

For duration of the auction, bidders also lock up ETH that counts towards their bid. They are encouraged to make this a larger figure than their actual bid to help obfuscate the final auction price

Invalid or losing bids will receive a full refund. Winning bids receive a share of ERC20 tokens proportional to their share of the winning bid and a refund of their additional locked up ETH

In the case that an auctioneer's private key is not revealed correctly, all bidders are refunded