The problem NFT-Ocean solves

NFT Marketplaces are now commonplace, but for auctions, most of them only offer the traditional mechanism where the auctioneer chooses a base price for the NFT and potential buyers place higher bids until finally the highest bid is approved. This is called an English Auction. NFT-Ocean stands out by enabling its users to choose the custom mechanism they prefer for the auction. In addition to English Auctions, it also provides the following auction mechanisms-

• Dutch Auction

  A Dutch auction is a price discovery process in which the auctioneer starts with the highest asking price and lowers it until it reaches a price level where the bids received will cover the entire offer quantity. The goal of a Dutch auction is to find the optimal price at which to sell the item.

• Vickery Auction

  A Vickery auction is a sealed-bid auction where bidders submit bids without knowing the bids of other people. The individual is bidding their true value and are not trying to assess what everyone else is going to bid. However, the price paid is the second-highest bid price and not the winning bid price. Therefore, the individual is bidding the maximum amount they are willing to pay and are not disadvantaged by it.

NFT Ocean offers three virtual auction houses, one corresponding to each auction mechanism. The use of custom auction methods enables both creators and collectors to competently trade their NFTs. So in case a particular creator did not receive satisfactory offers for an NFT, they can choose to switch to another auction scheme to try and get better price deals. Similarly, collectors can also check out the different auction mechanisms to discover the best deals for purchase.

Features

• Deployed on Polygon Testnet - instant and inexpensive transactions
• Off-chain NFT data is stored using NFT.storage on IPFS and Filecoin
• Price conversions using Chainlink Price Feeds - secure and reliable
• Using Metamask browser wallet to interact with the DApp

Challenges we ran into

Working on the project while we had our university exams going on was the major challenge that we had faced. But fortunately we did not face any critical time constraints and were able to complete the project within the deadline. Due to the wide variety of features offered by the platform, the smart contract consequently swelled up in size and we had to spend some time in optimizing and downsizing it so as to make it deployable. We also faced some trouble in using NFT.storage, but we were later able to fix the issues.