MyEtherPony has released an eBay like auction process on the Ethereum blockchain. MyEtherPony’s marketplace makes use of on chain transactions hybrid to achieve such functionality.

Immutability provided by blockchain technology can be harnessed by an auction process where the highest bidder wins. This eliminates the need for a third-party (an auctioneer), making auctions more transparent and decentralized.

The role of the auctioneer includes checking bidders financial standing and availability of fund and ensuring a smooth handover of assets to the winning bidders:

To enable such functions on the blockchain, MyEtherPony uses a special type of wallet called a Bidding Wallet. A Bidding Wallet makes the process more transparent as it acts as an escrow service with a smart contract based on the following rules.

  1. Keeps the token sent locked in if your bid is the current highest bid
  2. Unlock the token sent if you are no longer the highest bidder,
    1. You can withdraw the tokens from the bidding wallet or
    2. You can start bidding on another pony.
  3. Keeps the pony being bid on in escrow, once the bid process ends, the pony and tokens will exchange ownerships between the winning bidder and the seller.

A buyer will have to send some initial tokens to his Bidding Wallet to bid on a pony. To ensure the total availability of funds, the buyer’s balance must be slightly higher than the bid. When prices of the bid increases, the bidder will need to top up the balance of the Bidding Wallet.

In situations where the buyer thinks the bidding price is too high, he is free to withdraw his bid if he is not currently the highest bid.

This bidding process is desired with the implementation od on-chain smart contracts and off-chain business rule to reduce the gas fees while able to achieve the functionality of minimum bid mechanism like eBay. MyEtherPony’s bidding platform on the blockchain is more secure than eBay where there is a risk that the bid winner might not pay for the item.

In an interview with CoinNewsLive, Amir Irwan - CEO of MyEtherPony established that the gaming industry can trigger massive adoption of blockchain technology.

I think games industry can trigger this consumer massive adoption. The market size of the games industry is more than USD100 billion yearly with millions of users and these users are mostly tech-savvy. It is an open secret amongst game developers that many technologies within games have been applied outside of its own industry. Furthermore, game developers have always been looking at ways to make their games more user-friendly and intuitive to increase their own user base. It would be interesting to see how game developers take this challenge of making crypto and blockchain a mainstream technology.

Irwan then sighted MyEtherPony as a platform taking the challenge seriously.

At MyEtherPony, we are taking this challenge seriously and we are looking at ways at making the user experience better especially to those who are not familiar with crypto/blockchain. Hopefully, we would be contributing our part to the introduction of blockchain technology and educating the masses in a simple way as possible.

MyEtherPony Marketplace provides a great example of the application of blockchain technology in the gaming industry and its underlying bidding technology also shows the power of blockchain in the e-commerce and financial technology sector.

Will games such as MyEtherPoney lead to mass blockchain adoption? Leave a comment below.