🔨Open Auction

The Bidding War

An NFT owner (or 'lister') can auction their NFTs. Potential buyers make bids in the auction. At the closing of the auction, the buyer with the wining bid gets the auctioned NFTs, and the lister gets the winning bid amount.

Auctions on Q Bazaar are English Auctions.

The NFTs to list in an auction do leave the wallet of the lister, and are escrowed in the market until the closing of the auction. Whenever a new winning bid is made by a buyer, the buyer deposits this bid amount into the market; this bid amount is escrowed in the market until a new winning bid is made. The previous winning bid amount is automatically refunded to the respective bidder.

Note: As a result, the new winning bidder pays for the gas used in refunding the previous winning bidder. This trade-off is made for better UX for bidders — a bidder that has been outbid is automatically refunded, and does not need to pull out their deposited bid manually. This reduces bidding to a single action, instead of two actions — bidding, and pulling out the bid on being outbid.

Once the auction window ends, the seller collects the highest bid from their portfolio page, and the buyer receives the auctioned NFTs. (see here)

Auctions can also have a buyout price. This functions similar to a Fixed-Price Sale in addition to the auction. Once a buyout occurs, auction ends instantly and the seller can collect the buyout value from their portfolio, while the buyer receives the NFT.

Every auction listing obeys two 'buffers' to make it a fair auction:

1. Time buffer: this is measured in seconds (by default, 15 minutes or 900 seconds). If a winning bid is made within the buffer of the auction closing (e.g. 15 minutes within the auction closing), the auction's closing time is increased by the buffer to prevent buyers from making last minute winning bids, and to give time to other buyers to make a higher bid if they wish to.

2. Bid buffer: this is a percentage (by default, 5%). A new bid is considered to be a winning bid only if its bid amount is at least the bid buffer (e.g. 5%) greater than the previous winning bid. This prevents buyers from making insignificantly higher bids to win the auctioned items.

Note: It is not possible to cancel auctions prematurely at this time.

If an auction ends without bids, the seller can go to their portfolio page to cancel the auction listing and the NFT is returned to the seller.