Cross-Chain Sealed-Bid Auctions Using Confidential Compute Blockchains
Jonas Gebele, Timm Mutzel, Burak Oez, and Florian Matthes

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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
