Leviathan’s auction site has launched!
We did an experiment last year to try to value Leviathan media inventory, and we were thrilled to see a ton of interest in the SQUID pass.
We decided to formalize this process, moving it onchain and away from OpenSea. The result is our new auction site where we’ll be periodically listing new auctions related to Leviathan.
We presently have a pair of auctions set to expire Friday — one of potential interest to editors of Leviathan articles. All the news you see on the Leviathan feed is curated by members of the community through our Telegram bot. Submit, edit, and vote on articles and earn $SQUID from our monthly airdrop, it’s that easy.
This auction provides a 2x multiplier for all the $SQUID earned for the month — deducted from all others who don’t hold the $SQUID pass. It could be a pure profit play for editors (not financial advice of course).
The second live auction at the moment is to be a guest of honor at a Llama Party. We’ve been hosting weekly Llama Parties, in which we chat with people in the community about all things crypto — a great opportunity to pitch updates in your product or just hang out.
About
The auction contracts may be familiar to anybody who previously participated in the Llamas auctions. Two years ago the Llamas ran a contiguous series hourly auctions of their limited run NFT set. It was quite a blast to see all eyes in crypto fixated on the returns.
In building this auction contract the team worked from this baseline to produce a comprehensive auction platform. The architecture is modular, so additional auction types can be phased in over time. The team chatted with the Llama NFT team about their experience and figured out how to adjust the contracts to the needs of a leading news organization. For instance, the contracts include provisions to submit data in the form of IPFS hashes along with bids, so as to provide the capability for a fully decentralized auction house.
The mechanics of the auctions work very similarly to the prior Llama auctions. When a bid is placed near the end of the auction, the auction is extended by an amount of time specific to each auction. Bids must be placed above a certain percentage above the prior bid, and the friendly UI explains the process.
In addition to the UI, a Telegram bot is also coming soon to allow you to bid directly in Telegram and receive notifications on bids. Stay tuned for updates.
For safety, the auction contract only deals in $SQUID. In the event of a catastrophic hack, the Leviathan team at this stage could easily enough snapshot and reissue $SQUID before the hack.
To facilitate trading, the contracts include modular zap contracts. At present this is implemented to allow bidding directly using WETH. The zap contract trades WETH directly in the SQUID/WETH Curve pool on Fraxtal, so no WETH stays in the contracts as a honeypot for hackers.
That said, the contracts are unaudited, so use them at your own risk. Take some time to peruse the codebase — written in Vyper it is fairly comprehensible even to non-coders.