CipherBid

During the height of the internet bubble, a unique type of auction took Europe by storm: the Lowest Unique Bid Auction. With just a few Euros, anyone had a chance to win the latest tech gadgets of the time.

The concept was straightforward yet captivating: instead of competing for the highest bid, participants aimed for the lowest unique amount. Tales of people winning coveted Nokia phones and high-end hi-fi systems for mere pocket change spread like wildfire across the internet and television, making these auctions a sensation.

Fast forward to the present day, the transparency of those auctions remains shrouded in mystery. No one truly knows what happened behind the scenes or how fair they really were… until now.

Enter Full Homomorphic Encryption (FHE): a revolutionary technology enabling everyone to not only bid permissionlessly but also to trustlessly verify the auction results. The age of opaque auctions is over, ushering in a new era of fairness and accountability.

To bring this vision to life, we leveraged Oasis Sapphire, a platform that combines power with simplicity, making it the perfect choice for implementing privacy-preserving computations. Its features allowed us to build a seamless bidding experience with robust security and transparency.

Here’s how it works:

Starting the Auction: Anyone can initiate an auction via the smart contract, defining the parameters such as the bidding range and duration. Bidding Process: Participants submit their bids directly on-chain, encrypted for privacy. They can choose any amount they believe will secure their win. Determining the Winner: Once the auction ends, all encrypted bids are revealed and passed off-chain to a pre-published algorithm. This algorithm processes the data, determines the lowest unique bid, and identifies the winner. We considered leveraging Runtime Off-chain Logic (ROFL) to handle the calculation entirely off-chain in a decentralised manner. However, due to time constraints, this feature remains a promising enhancement for the future.

With this foundation, we’ve laid the groundwork for fair and trustless Lowest Unique Bid Auctions, powered by cutting-edge blockchain technology.