Auctionify

A decentral stand-alone platform to facilitate Ethereum blockchain as a fair auctioning and payment infrastructure.

Motto: Let's meet the society half way through (decentralization).

Note: Auctionify can be used to run decentral auctions, the final transfer of the auctioned goods needs to be done separate from the auction, same way as it is currently in the real world.

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Back story:

You may know the deal with DevCon4 ticket sales. They sold the tickets in waves (~500 tickets in each wave), but the tickets where sold out within minutes. I managed to get in one of the waves, but later on got another ticket for our breakout room. I decided to auction the ticket within Ethereum community, however after writing a simple auction smart contract, there was no easy way to have a nice interface on top of it. I'm a coder and a Blockchain engineer and it still was not easy to set up a fully functional UI for the auction to send around. And who can really interact with a smart contract with no UI?

Long story short, we decided to develop Auctionify, a shopify for auctions (Using Ethereum smart contracts), something really easy to use.

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How it works:

1. Beneficiary creates an auction (Smart contract) with the following inputs:

   • Title
   • Description
   • Auction end time
   • Minimum acceptable bid (Optional, default 0.1 ETH)
   • Beneficiary address

2. Bidders start to bid

   • The first bidder will become the highest Bidder
   • From there on, every highest Bidder will refund the second highest bidder
   • lower bids will be refunded right away
   • Note: Do not use exchanges or addresses you do not control to send bids to any auctions. If so, the refunded bids may not be under your control anymore.

3. When auction ends, only the highest Bidder (or if Escrow enabled the Escrow Moderator) can finalize the auction. Finalizing the auction sends the funds to the beneficiary.

• If there is dispute, the dispute work flow is similar to open source bugs, you have to open a github issue with the details required in [GITHUB REPO FOR DISPUTES].

            (1) Deploy       (3) Finalize Auction
Beneficiary +---------> + <------------------------+
                        |                          |
                        |                          |
                        |                          |
         (2.1) Bid      v         (2.3) Bid        |
Bidder 1 ---------> |Auction|<----------------- Bidder 3 
                       ^                    (HighestBidder)
                       |
                       |(2.2) Bid 
                       |
                     Bidder 2

• (1) Deploy: Smart contract is deployed on the blockchain
• (2.1) Bid: Bidder 1 bids on the auction
• (2.2) Bid: Bidder 2 bids higher than bidder 1 on the auction, this refunds bidder 1 the amount he/she bid
• (2.3) Bid: Bidder 3 bids higher than bidder 2, refunding bidder 2 and being the highest bidder when the auction ends
• (3) Bid: Highest Bidder (Bidder 3) on receiving auctioned goods, finalizes the auction to release the funds (bid) to the Beneficiary

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Where is what?

• Auctionify.xyz is completely open source and hosted on github (No privately controlled server): Github
• Auctionify.sol is the smart contract used as the backend for the auctions, completely open source and documented: Github

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Usage

Run Locally

yarn install
yarn start

Deploy

yarn deploy

TODO:

• ENS resolver for escrows (.eth to Eth address)
  • Defaults to auctionify.eth
  • Fee structure for escrow
  • Github repo and issue template for disputes
  • Trusted escrows (?)
• Auction registry smart contract
  • opt out option (unlisted)
• Page for verify highestBidder's authenticity
  • Sign message/contact for Highest bidder(email/phone)
  • Verify page for Beneficiary (argument in URL?)
• More wallet support (Hardware wallets, etc)
  • Use MyEtherWallet style integration (?)
• Versioning between UI and smart contract
  • UI should load appropriate ABI for the auction's version
• Host UI on IPFS
  • Link auctionify.xyz to the IPFS content

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Disclaimer : This is a work in progress, make sure you know what you are doing before putting your life savings on an auction.

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License: GNU GPLv3