Verifiable Timed Commitments f or Fair Sealed-bid Auctions

Timed commitment is a type of commitment scheme that allows the recipient to open the committed value in the future without needing a committer. It has found widespread use where “time dependency” is essential. Fair contract signing, sealed-bid auctions, cryptocurrencies, and multiparty computation are the areas where timed commitments provide added value. Verifiability and fairness are key considerations for many of these applications, as they aim to foster a trusted environment. In this work, the primary emphasis is on first-price sealed-bid auctions, where we believe that both verifiability and fairness hold equal significance. With the help of verifiable timed commitments, it is possible to design an auction in a verifiable way. In addition, the construction of such a fair environment is important in building a foolproof mechanism. We propose a two-stage protocol to conduct an auction process as trustworthy as possible. Initially, the seller makes an auctioneer and bidders sign a contract with a multi-signature protocol. Later, bidders encrypt their bids and send them via verifiable timed commitment (VTC) so that they can be verifiable and forced open by the auctioneer after some predefined time.