Dear community, today, my team and I are glad to announce a huge milestone for Auctionity, probably the biggest one since we’ve started working on the project: payment guarantee is available for our blockchain- based auctions on Auctionity. For a further detailed explanation about the payment guarantee features, please read our previous article.
This step is an important milestone in our endeavour to create a bridge between blockchain and traditional auction markets. This reality is called Auctionity. It took us half a year to finalize the concept, find the technical solutions and fine-tune the underlying economics to make our product fast, reliable and efficient.
Overall, we could not be happier with the progress accomplished on our product over the last quarter. The entire team is looking forward to an exciting year ahead and we are confident that Auctionity will establish itself among the top blockchain application. This will be possible once we start to announce more large-scale Fortune Global 500 partnerships that will operate a shift in the perception of auctions markets in general.
Tristan — CEO of DomRaider announced:
We are currently working closely with our business team to explore new synergies and partnerships on a larger scale with a view to promote the mainstream adoption of our decentralized blockchain auctions ecosystem. I am confident that Auctionity will manage to establish itself as an open source standard around the world.
What’s in Payment Guarantee?
100% blockchain: every action happens on a blockchain.
The Auctionity payment guarantee offers a security to the sellers. Payment guarantee ensures the seller of the payment obligations of the buyer and is linked to the sale of the seller’s object at auctions. As Auctionity works on a blockchain system, the buyer (i.e the person with the highest bid at the end of the auction sale) can’t retract once the auction ends. The fact that he won the auction is an event that will be written in the blockchain Auctionity. It is tamper-proof and not editable by anyone.
The payment guarantee goes even further to protect sellers by ensuring that each bidder actually posesses the amount he is using to bid on an item. On the Auctionity platform, the bidder can only use the amount he has previously transferred to his account. If he wishes to bid more than the amount he has available on his Auctionity account, he will need to make another transfer to refund the account. Thus, no surprise for the seller: the buyer simply cannot bid if he does not have the required funds.
The transactions taking place on the Auctionity blockchain do not involve real money transfer. When you bid on the Auctionity platform, the money is not transferred but the information is written on the contract in the Ethereum network. This is because the Auctionity blockchain is a private blockchain where the ETH has no value. It means the buyer do not have to pay a gas fee each time he wants to bid or loses the leading position in the auction and recovers his funds. This information is however well recorded in the contract on the Ethereum network.
When the buyer is supplying its Auctionity account to take part in auctions, it is recommended to add more funds in one setting rather than adding several small amounts in several settings. Indeed, the supply comes from the blockchain Ethereum Live, so gas costs are applicable for each action performed. The gas costs are the same regardless of the amount transferred, so it is better to add a large amount at once rather than several small amounts. In addition, the transaction validation time on the Ethereum blockchain is about 2 minutes, so it is wise to have enough funds available to be sure to win an auction.
At the end of an auction, a voucher is issued by Auctionity to the seller. The seller will be able to recover his gains by using his voucher on the Live Ethereum blockchain. He will have to pay the gas costs to withdraw the sum.
Payment guarantee is currently available on the Ethereum test network: Rinkeby. Unlike Ether on the Ethereum Live network, the ETH in this network has no value and is simply used for demonstration purposes on our platform. Indeed the Payment guarantee will be migrated to the Ethereum Livenet in a couple of weeks, just to allow us time to ensure everything is going smoothly and make it available for the community.
I invite you to access the Testnet App and try it out through a Metamask or hardware wallet (Ledger or Trezor) here: https://app.testnet-auctionity.com. Your feedback is greatly appreciated as it will help us improve this first version and create a product to best align with your expectations.
What’s in the next chapter of our story?
Thanks to the fantastic DomRaider community and Auctionity team we had an awesome start with the release of the MVP in January 2018. Now with the launch of payment guarantee we are definitely getting closer to our objectives but a lot remains to be done. The next move will be Delivery Guarantee, which is an important milestone for Auctionity and another application usage of blockchain for the bidder. This great feature will be delivered in September with some other great things like sponsorship, referral, and saleroom…
In a couple of weeks you will see our strategic roadmap updated for Auctionity for 2018 and beyond, including our plans up to Q2 2019. We have completed the milestones for Q1-Q2 successfully and are now looking forward to the upcoming challenges. Things certainly remain exciting, so stay tuned!
We are making things happen: Auctionity is on the right track.
We still need you to show your support: follow us on our various media, relay our communications to spread the word and stay tuned for more updates!
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