Electronic Auction Scheme Based on Smart Contract and IPFS

Sealed-bid auctions are a vital transaction tool in the e-commerce field.Traditional centralized auction schemes typically result in severe threats to data integrity,information transparency,and traceability owing to their excessive reliance on third parties,and blockchain-based auction schemes generally suffer from high storage costs and are deficient in functional and architectural design.To solve these problems,this study presents a sealed-bid auction scheme that removes the third-party based on an Ethereum smart contract,ensuring data integrity,openness,and transparency in the execution process.The commitment mechanism and distributed storage system help to significantly reduce the user’s storage cost and protect the privacy of user bids.For the functional design,this study introduces a fulltext-retrieval and dispute-processing module for commodities,which reduces the defects existing in the functional module design of existing auction systems.Furthermore,a prototype auction system on the Ethereum test chain is built to validate the proposed scheme.Experiments show that compared with traditional storage methods,indirect storage based on a distributed storage system of texts and images can reduce the storage cost by at least 50%while ensuring data integrity.Finally,the gas cost at each stage of the auction scheme and the time required for the full-text retrieval of products are recorded to evaluate the scheme performance and analyze the test results.