What is Generic Bidding Service?
Generic Bidding Service is evoluted from existing auction module from HaveFund Platform.
As its name implies, it serves wide range of variation of auction bidding processes by parameterization, customization or extension. The auction process is guaranteed to be secured. The auctioned good full data are encrypted and will only be exposed to the winners when auction ends. Likewise, the bids are also encrypted and will only be exposed to the auction seller when auction ends.
Generic Bidding Service conducts auction process and communicates with auction seller and bidders through message queue and REST API endpoint. The service comes with a SDK with various event listeners and API client such that seller/bidders can simply consume it.
Features and Benefits
Customizable and extensible
Auction process can be varied depends on the scenarios. There is no hard auction rules that everyone need to follow. In the reality everybody have their own special rules and special flow. Generic Bidding Service is to provide not just a basic and simple auction process but also a customizable and extensible service to serve different scenario.
Integration Friendly
Generic Bidding Service comes with a Node.js SDK which helps to consume and talk to the service. You can just add it as your application dependency and use it.
Data Protection
The auctioned good detail and the bids are encrypted by default. It will only be revealed when it needs. For each auction, the auctioneer process, the seller, and the bidders will have their own unique key pair generated to protect the data to transfer.
Use Case
Blind Auction
This is what HaveFund’s doing. HaveFund provides an auction platform for the loan seller to put their loan and winning criteria on, and open for biddings. Bidders cannot see the bid submitted by each others. When auction ends, winners are resolved depending on the winning criteria. It can be highest amount, lowest interest rate or whatever.
Buy Out
By default it’s not supported by the service but it can be achieved by extension. Like what ebay does, instead of bidding, you can directly purchase the auctioned goods with a marked price and auction ends immediately.
Seller picked winners from suggestions
In some cases we may want to provide more advantages for the seller. Instead of picking the winners by the algorithm, it’s possible to pick 5 (or whatever numbers) suggestions to seller and let seller to pick a winner from them. This is already supported by default.
Voting
Instead of bidding, it can be customized as a secure voting system. Voters are bidders while votes are bids, which are all encrypted by an unique key pair per voter. Nobody can see the vote from each other. The vote counter (i.e. the auctioneer) process can be separated in a trusted execution environment such that nobody can even have accesses to the decrypted votes to ensure fairness.
If you want to know more about this simple yet very flexible service, reach out to us via our contact form.