NFT Auction Recap: 488,766 hbars for Charity
GEHRIG
Sep 23, 2021
by Gehrig Kunz
Product Marketing at Hedera Hashgraph

At roughly 1 am this morning my wife and I were watching the results of the first Charity NFT Auction on Hedera. “Do not go gentle into that good night”, said famous poet Dylan Thomas and our bidders. For our bidders surely raged against the dying of the light.

You can see what I mean in the chart below, which shows bids over time for the auction of each item.

Last second bidders made things interesting


The massive spike at the end culminated with several new winning bids, ending the total amount donated to 488,766 hbars. At the time of this writing, that’s around $185,000 that we’ll be sending to the Dallas-based charity, Hopeful Solutions.

The auction was a resounding success. The community had fun, learned about Hedera functionality, and we raised meaningful funds for a worthy cause. We were able to interact with Hedera first hand. Bids cost users $0.0001 to place, a nice reprieve from the highly variable gas fees found on other networks, and reached finality in consensus.

Don't take my word for it

As this is all recorded on the ledger, you don’t have to take my word for it. We’re able to trace our auction and its results. To start, here is the Hedera Consensus Service topic, 0.0.447164, that was used to manage the auction.

You’ll notice the nine (eight items plus one test) `CreateAuction` transactions that were used for the validators to communicate the state of each auction. Which matches the UI found on the auction’s sold page.

Clicking into one of these CreateAuction’s and we can see our message.

Dragonglass displays this in hexadecimal so we can use a tool like Unit Conversion. When we paste the hexadecimal in our output we find one of our auctions:

Auction Create Message


The associated metadata of our Light in the dark auction tells us a lot of things, notably its account ID for the auction, 0.0.457752, and the NFT’s token ID, 0.0.457750, created with Hedera Token Service. Again, we can look these up in an explorer to see what’s happening. Here’s the auction account ID, which managed the hbar bidding process.

You’ll find the hbars flowing in and out of the account, be refunded if the bid was too low, or had been beaten by a subsequent larger bid. You’ll also notice an update account transaction, which changed the account’s "receiverSignRequired": true after the auction's end time to prevent any further bids.

For a deeper dive on how these components work together, their use of multi-signatures, and scheduled transactions read our blog, The Charity NFT Auction on Hedera is Open for Bids and Builders.

I hope this charity auction and its deconstruction provide you insight into the potential to build fast and efficient decentralized applications on Hedera. If you are a winner from the auction, please reach out to me or a member of Hedera team, or read the Auction's FAQ for further information on KYC. If you’re a developer we invite you to check out the auction’s open-source repo. There’s so much potential to unlock.