MinAuction

The bidders do not want to reveal their identity: their assets and transaction history may encourage other players (seller or other bidders) to propose prices against the bidders' best interest. For example, one may expect whales to pay price premiums, or hike price slightly above the total asset of the current best bidder. A fair price discovery auction is needed. Zero knowledge proofs powered by Mina Protocol can attest the payability of the bidders without revealing their wallet address. The top bidder has the choice to message the seller without revealing the identity, while the seller has the choice to accept an offer with the communication with the bidder. This is the most fair way to conduct auctions when the product can carry more than financial values, such as shares of ventures.

This project uses @snarkyjs and Mina Protocol to create zero knowledge proofs and ensure privacy in the auction process. It is the backbone of the project as SnarkyJS greatly reduces the complexity of working with proofs and circuits. The protocol is very versatile to achieve various engineering goals. It is more than a bit hacky since the documentation is quite sparse and community documentation/Q&A is limited. I had to trace through the typescript syntax and various GitHub repos to piece together the current design. Overall, I am happy that I pulled it through as much as I can.