This week we have completed the Sunrise Auction process. Next week we will be completing some final tasks related to registrations & compliance, as well as testing the application on Fuji testnet.
This post will contain a full walk-through of the Sunrise Auction. First, we'll explain some important details about bidding.
The Sunrise Auction is a Vickrey auction. This means that users should bid the maximum amount that they are willing to pay to acquire a domain, knowing that they will not necessarily have to pay that amount.
Consider the following examples:
The first phase of the Sunrise Auction is Bid Placement. Users will need to search for the domains they wish to acquire, enter the amount they wish to bid on the name, and submit their sealed bids to the blockchain.
On a technical level, the only information that is submitted to the blockchain at this stage is a hash of the bid. The hash verifies that the user intends to bid, but does not reveal the domain they wish to bid on nor the amount they wish to bid. This prevents others from information gathering by observing the blockchain.
The second phase of the Sunrise Auction is the Bid Reveal. During this phase, the sealed bids placed in the previous step are revealed on-chain. Any bids that are not revealed will be disqualified.
After revealing the bids, the user must authorize the auction contract to withdraw enough WAVAX to cover the total of their bids.
The final phase of the Sunrise Auction is the Claim phase, where auction winners can claim the domains that they have won.
Winning a domain at auction will give the user a temporary registration (at the moment we have one month in mind). Users must return during the temporary registration to renew the domain for one or more years. Otherwise, the domain will expire and follow the expiry procedure (see the Name Lifecycle for more details).
We've implemented a basic bulk system, where users can download a template CSV, enter their bids, and submit them. We'll be testing the limits (i.e. number of domains) of this bulk system & providing recommendations on how to approach larger bulk orders. In general, we do not want to delay launch for optimizing the bulk order UI/UX.
In last week's update, we discussed some user-experience challenges that come along with providing domain privacy. As a quick refresher, names are stored on-chain as a hash and with only the hash it is not possible to determine the original name. As a result, if a user opens their wallet on a separate device or browser, they will not be able to see their names. See last week's update for our proposed solutions.
A user in our Discord mentioned a potential solution of relinquishing domain privacy - a great suggestion. This is a feature we intend to build in the future, which is necessary to support other features (for example, for reverse resolution). This will be the best option for many users, however it comes with an important consequence: once a domain is revealed, privacy cannot be regained in the future.
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