The bids stay sealed.The price does not.
Highest bidder wins and pays the second-highest bid. The chain learns one number and nothing else — not even the winner's own bid.
- Auctions
- 4
- Bids sealed
- 8
- Amounts disclosed
- 0
What this guarantees
What is assured: the winner and the clearing price are established by hash-preimage proofs verified on-chain over a bid set the contract froze before any bid could be opened, so the auctioneer cannot alter the outcome, exclude a bid, or misreport the price without failing a proof or being slashed in the dispute window. What is not: after sealing, the auctioneer learns every bid amount — it can never publish them, prove a false outcome, or spend anyone's funds, but it knows them; and the number of bids, their timing, and the uniform escrow amount are public on-chain.
The problem
On a public chain a sealed bid has never really been sealed. Either you hand your amount to an auctioneer and trust them not to look, not to leak, and not to insert a bid of their own once they have seen yours — or you use commit–reveal, and every losing bid is published at the end.
Publishing them destroys the thing a sealed auction is for. Your valuation is a business fact; it tells competitors what you will pay, and it is still true at the next auction.
Commit–reveal has a second failure that is less discussed: it locks no money. A bidder who dislikes the result simply never reveals. In a second-price auction one silent bidder moves the price the winner pays, so the mechanism stops producing the outcome it promises.
Vickrey never opens a bid. Collateral is escrowed up front, so silence costs money, and the winner and the price are proved from hash chains instead of disclosure. The losing bids are not withheld — they are never on the chain in the first place.
- Bid
- Pick a level. Two hash anchors go on chain. No amount, no address.
- Seal
- The contract stamps the block and freezes the set. Only then do seeds move.
- Settle
- N+1 witnesses prove the second price. Not one bid is opened.
Live auctions
View all auctions →Questions
Before you bid
What is a Vickrey auction?
The highest bidder wins and pays the second-highest bid. That makes bidding your true valuation the dominant strategy — shading your bid gains you nothing. It has been the theoretically optimal design since 1961.
How can the bids be sealed and the price still be proved?
A bid publishes two hash chains rather than an amount. Revealing a link of one proves “at or above this level”; the other proves “at or below”. The winner, the runner-up and everyone else each prove one bound, and together those pin the second price without opening a single bid.
What does the auctioneer learn, and when?
Nothing while bidding is open — it has not been sent anything. Once the contract freezes the bid set, bidders send their seeds, and from that moment the auctioneer knows every amount. It can never publish them, prove a false outcome, or spend anyone’s funds. But it knows them, and that is the honest limit of what this design gives you.
What happens if a bidder goes silent?
Settlement still completes. A bid nobody can prove is marked forfeit and left out of the ranking, and its escrow stays claimable by its owner whenever they come back. If leaving it out changed the outcome, that bidder can prove so during the dispute window and void the settlement.
What does it cost to bid?
Through the privacy pool: a flat pool fee per operation — 6 STRK on mainnet, read live from the pool rather than set by us — plus the escrow, which comes back. A bid placed directly on the contract costs gas alone; the amount stays sealed, but your address is public.
Is this audited? Is it on mainnet?
No, and not yet. The contracts are deployed to Sepolia and a complete auction has run there end to end. Nothing has been audited. Mainnet is the target before the sprint closes, and the README carries the honest status of every piece.