About AuctionHouse

Any on-chain asset that conforms to the Asset contract interface can be auctioned. Some examples of things that could be auctioned are virtual goods, domain names, tokens that represent a role in an on chain economy, or tokens that represent real world assets like tickets.

No. AuctionHouse is in alpha and is running on the Ethereum Ropsten Testnet. We will deploy it on the mainnet after a round of testing and security scrutiny from the community. There are also a number of semantic points that we'd like feedback on including how to best standardize representation of on chain non fungible assets in a secure way, so there may be changes before deploying to the mainnet.

As a decentralized app running on Ethereum, every user will need to be able to connect to an Ethereum node in order to interact with AuctionHouse. The easiest way to do this is to install MetaMask which is a browser extension that will connect you to Ethereum. You can also run your own Ethereum node locally. Remember that the contract is not live on the Mainnet yet, so point your Metamask or Node to the Ropsten Testnet to try out AuctionHouse.

For security purposes, it is recommend that Dapps use the withdraw pattern to let people remove their funds from contracts. This prevents a class of attacks where you should receive funds, but the attacker prevents it via stack limits. Instead, we will always show you your withdraw balance, and let you hit the withdraw button to receive these funds as long as your balance is greater than zero.

Since AuctionHouse is in alpha, and there aren't a lot of auctionable non-fungible goods on the blockchain yet, we wanted to make it easy for people to own an asset that they can auction. For demo purposes we created a simple contract called SampleName, and the "register a name" section on the create auction page is just an interface to register a fake domain name, so that you can create an auction with it. This step is optional, and if you were to deploy a contract that conformed to the Asset interface, then you could auction off a record from that contract.

AuctionHouse was built by Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang. We built it in order to get experience building an end-to-end Dapp complete with protocol layer, UI, and decentralized deployment. It's a work in progress, and we'd love to hear any feedback or bug reports through twitter or email, or on github issues.