Cross-Chain Sealed-Bid Auctions Using Confidential Compute Blockchains

TL;DR

This paper introduces a privacy-preserving sealed-bid auction protocol leveraging trusted execution environments on confidential compute blockchains, enabling secure, scalable, and transparent auctions without trusted third parties.

Contribution

It presents a novel protocol combining TEEs with public blockchains to achieve confidential, verifiable, and scalable sealed-bid auctions without trusted intermediaries or complex cryptography.

Findings

Secure auction execution on confidential compute blockchain.

Effective escrow and bid confidentiality maintained.

Scalability and minimal infrastructure integration demonstrated.

Abstract

Sealed-bid auctions ensure fair competition and efficient allocation but are often deployed on centralized infrastructure, enabling opaque manipulation. Public blockchains eliminate central control, yet their inherent transparency conflicts with the confidentiality required for sealed bidding. Prior attempts struggle to reconcile privacy, verifiability, and scalability without relying on trusted intermediaries, multi-round protocols, or expensive cryptography. We present a sealed-bid auction protocol that executes sensitive bidding logic on a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)-backed confidential compute blockchain while retaining settlement and enforcement on a public chain. Bidders commit funds to enclave-generated escrow addresses, ensuring confidentiality and binding commitments. After the deadline, any party can trigger resolution: the confidential blockchain determines the winner through verifiable off-chain computation and issues signed settlement transactions for execution on the public chain. Our design provides security, privacy, and scalability without trusted third parties or protocol modifications. We implement it on SUAVE with Ethereum settlement, evaluate its scalability and trust assumptions, and demonstrate deployment with minimal integration on existing infrastructure