Auction Smart Contract

A smart contract for conducting an auction for a set of bidders and a set of items.

Dependencies

• ganache or ganache-cli, truffle, solc

Instructions

ganache
truffle migrate --reset

• To compile Auction.sol - truffle compile
• To run tests in auction.js - truffle test

Working and Structure

• The auctioneer initialises the contract with the values Q and M, where Q is a prime number used for random representation of values, and M is the number of items in the item set.
• Once the contract is created, Notaries and bidders can register(registerNotary() and registerBidder()) for the auction. No bidder can place a bid more than once and no notary can register more than once.
• The auctioneer assigns distinct notaries to each bidder(assignNotary()). The bid values for the assigned bidder are accessible by this notary.
• Now, the notaries are required to perform work i.e. they exchange values among each other(performWork()), which is later used for sorting the bidder list.
• Once the notaries have exchanged values, the auctioneer calls the sortBidders() function, which sorts the bidder in a descending order, according to a specific procedure involving random representations.
• To calculate the winners, Notaries are now required to exchange values, to calcuate whether the items bidded are intersecting with other bidders or not(priorWinners()).
• Once the winners are calculated, the auctioneer calls the findWinners() function which determines the final winners.
• The makePayments() function determines how much the winners owe.
• The notaries are paid in proportion to the amount of work done by them.