Censorship-Resistant Sealed-Bid Auctions on Blockchains

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14939v1
• Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:24:51 GMT
• Title: Censorship-Resistant Sealed-Bid Auctions on Blockchains
• Abstract summary: We formalize four properties -- each necessary to prevent a concrete attack -- and design a protocol for latency-sensitive sealed-bid auctions.<n>Our protocol uses a timestamping oracle and a censorship-resistant inclusion predicate, with only the winning bid settled on-chain.<n>Our construction relies on two zero-knowledge proofs: an eligibility proof that anonymously proves deposit membership to the timestamping committee, and an auction proof that binds a bid to a specific auction for the inclusion list committee.
• Score: 9.19199293714143
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Auctions are now central to blockchain markets, settling NFT sales, token launches, DeFi liquidations, and arbitrage opportunities. Each on-chain bid is a public transaction whose inclusion is decided by a single consensus proposer per block. The proposer can observe pending bids, exclude competitors, and submit bids of their own, breaking the fairness guarantees of classical sealed-bid auctions. To enable latency-sensitive sealed-bid auctions in blockchain settings, we formalize four properties -- each necessary to prevent a concrete attack -- and design a protocol achieving all four: hiding bid contents, existence, and bidder identity until reveal (Hiding); counting all timely honest bids and rejecting late adversarial bids (Simultaneous Release); preventing silent withdrawal of committed bids (No Free Bid Withdrawal); and charging on-chain fees only to winners (Auction Participation Efficiency). Our protocol uses a timestamping oracle (instantiated with a committee of 2f_ts+1 timestampers) and a censorship-resistant inclusion predicate (instantiated using a FOCIL-based inclusion list), with only the winning bid settled on-chain. Our construction relies on two zero-knowledge proofs: an eligibility proof that anonymously proves deposit membership to the timestamping committee, and an auction proof that binds a bid to a specific auction for the inclusion list committee. We implement both using Groth16 over BN254 with Poseidon hashing in arkworks/Rust: the auction proof generates in 13 ms and verifies in under 1 ms; eligibility proofs for Merkle trees up to 2^32 bidders generate in 47-159 ms and verify in about 1 ms. Together, this yields a sealed-bid auction primitive practical for high-value, time-sensitive blockchain settings.

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