Survey on Decentralized Auctioning Systems

An electronic auction (e-auction) is an efficient negotiation model that allows multiple sellers or buyers to compete for assets or rights. Such systems have become increasingly popular with the evolution of the internet for commerce. In centralized auctioning systems, the presence of a governing third party has been a major trust concern, as such a party may not always be trustworthy or create transaction fees for the hosted auctions. Distributed and decentralized systems based on blockchain for auctions of nonphysical assets have been suggested as a means to distribute and establish trust among peers, and manage disputes and concurrent entries. Although a blockchain system provides attractive features such as decentralized trust management and fraud prevention, it cannot alone support dispute resolutions and adjudications for physical assets. In this paper, we compare blockchain and non-blockchain decentralized auctioning systems based on the identified functional needs and quality attributes. We contrast these needs and attributes with the state-of-the-art models and other implementations of auctioning systems, and discuss the associated trade-offs. We further analyze the gaps in the existing decentralized approaches and propose design approaches for decentralized auctioning systems, for both physical and nonphysical assets, that support dispute resolution and adjudication based on collected evidence, and dispute prevention based on distributed consensus algorithms.