Ghost Auction — Open Questions for Deeper Understanding

General
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Ghost Auction is already built and live on testnet — and in my view it represents one of the more underutilized tools we have for attracting new users and bootstrapping real AUM both before and after mainnet launch.

Following this morning’s Whales Wednesday conversation, I realized my own understanding of its exact mechanics wasn’t as solid as it needed to be to think creatively about how to deploy it. I went looking for documentation — Ghost Git, docs.ghostchain.io, the blog — and found almost nothing beyond the app itself (https://app.auction.ghostchain.io). So rather than speculate, I’ve compiled my outstanding questions below.

I’ve already envisioned a couple of potential use cases for attracting users and liquidity, but I want to make sure my foundation is correct before building on it. If this gets traction as a Whales Wednesday topic, I’ll update this post with the answers we surface from the dev team, as well as the brainstorming ideas that come out of that session.

CONFIRMED MECHANICS (verified from UI screenshots)

  • Bidders either win the NFT or lose their entire bid — no ETH is returned on a loss

  • Revenue split on every bid: 90% to creator, 9% to Reward Pool, 1% to ghostDAO treasury

  • Only one NFT is auctioned at a time — the one with the highest Prize value

  • Bidders earn pTCKTs on every bid regardless of win/loss

  • Bidders also earn pTCKTs through referrals via a unique wallet-linked URL

  • 3-hour bidding window per auction, or until sold — whichever comes first

  • Reward Pool grows with every bid placed across the platform

SECTION 1 — Bidding Mechanics

Q1. Do multiple bids from the same wallet aggregate or stand independently? If a bidder places 0.1 ETH, then 5 minutes later places another 0.1 ETH on the same auction, does the protocol treat them as a single 0.2 ETH position — increasing win probability accordingly — or as two separate independent bids? This affects strategy significantly: can a bidder build a position incrementally by watching other bids come in, or does each bid stand entirely on its own?

Q2. If bids do aggregate, is win probability calculated on the running total or per individual bid? Related to Q1 — if aggregation exists, how does the probability math work across multiple bids from the same wallet?

SECTION 2 — Prize & Queue System

Q3. How is the value of a Prize assessed to determine queue position? The queue ranks NFTs by Prize value, where higher Prize = higher priority. But a Prize can consist of any combination of native coins and ERC-20 tokens. How does the protocol assess the USD or ETH value of those tokens to rank them? Is it pulling a live price feed (oracle), indexing a specific DEX, CoinMarketCap, Dex Tools, using a fixed internal rate, or ranking purely by token quantity rather than value? And how is this verified and validated onchain?

Q4. What happens to the Prize when an NFT is sold? Does the Prize transfer to the buyer along with the NFT, or does it get redistributed? This is important for understanding the true economics of buying at a discount — the buyer may be acquiring the Prize collateral as part of the deal.

SECTION 3 — pTCKT Mechanics

Q5. What is the pTCKT earning rate for bids? The protocol confirms you earn pTCKTs by placing bids, but the specific formula (e.g., X pTCKTs per 0.01 ETH bid) is not documented in any public source reviewed so far.

Q6. Are pTCKTs transferable between wallets? Can pTCKTs be sent to another wallet, sold, or traded? Or are they permanently bound to the wallet that earned them?

Q7. Is there a pTCKT decay or expiry mechanism? Do pTCKTs expire, lose value over time, or persist indefinitely until spent in the Reward Pool?

Q8. Is total outstanding pTCKT supply visible anywhere? The Reward Pool modal UI shows your personal pTCKT balance but does not display total outstanding pTCKTs across all holders. Is this tracked onchain and queryable, or only accessible to the dev team?

3a — Referral Mechanism

Q9. Is the referral URL persistent or per-auction/per-session? The referral URL is linked to a wallet address. If someone shares their referral link and a referred user participates in today’s auction, then returns and participates in tomorrow’s auction independently — does the referrer earn pTCKTs on both auctions? Or does the referral only apply to the first interaction?

Q10. What is the pTCKT earning rate for referrals? No formula is documented. Is it a flat amount per referred bid, a percentage of the referred user’s bid, or something else? Note: ghostAirdrop’s GMV referral system uses a sigmoid function that scales non-linearly with referral count — worth asking if pTCKT referrals follow a similar model.

SECTION 4 — Reward Pool

Q11. What determines win probability in the Reward Pool? The UI shows “Expected APY” and “Tickets Played” but the exact formula — how pTCKT spend converts to winning odds — is not documented.

Q12. How frequently does the Reward Pool pay out? Is there a trigger (e.g., after every X auctions, after a time period, when pool reaches a threshold), or is it continuous?

SECTION 5 — Documentation & Transparency

Q13. Where are the Ghost Auction smart contracts? No ghost-auction repo exists in the public Ghost Git (git.ghostchain.io). Contracts are either in a private repo or not yet published. When is the team/community planning to open-source the auction contracts?

Q14. Is there a Ghost Auction-specific litepaper or whitepaper? None found. The ghostDAO Litepaper covers the reserve currency protocol (staking/bonding/bridging) — a separate product. Ghost Auction has no equivalent public design document.

Sources Checked — No Auction-Specific Results Found

  • Ghost GitHub (git.ghostchain.io): 13 public repos, no ghost-auction repo

  • docs.ghostchain.io: no ghostAuction documentation section

  • docs.nft.ghostchain.io: covers ERC721Envious standard only

  • ghostDAO Litepaper V10: covers ghostDAO protocol, not Ghost Auction

  • Ghost Blog: one how-to guide for listing NFTs on Sepolia testnet only

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Thank you foe finding the link to the product. I did not use that in my comparision to FWA.FU?n/, but only had screenshots, I may update my doc and will answer your questions either in a post here or submit as a doc to in this thread which might be cleaner…What is best for the forum?

1 Like
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In my opinion, a post would be better than a doc unless it’s extremely dense.

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Excellent. Also please do not count me in the CSPR giveaway. Hopefully someone else will chime in before Whale Wed.

re: Section 5. Ghost Auction documentation is quite lite, but it was launched on four chains.

re: Section 4. The reward pool had a countdown timer, so there were time periods. I do recall that a user could trigger the payout simliar to breakout of bond on hoodie. I recall my persoanl experience where I might have bet a lot in one period and so had a lot of the % or pTickets and triggered a payout and won…

re: 3a, I d not have an answer other than that referrals are easily gamed and poorly attributed to an honest referrer. There has to be another way for true organic growth.

re: 3. like any kind of lottery, tickets expire on the draw end time.

re: 2. the top bid wins the NFT and the collateral bound to the NFT. Similaar to Gacha, you can immediatly re-enter the NFT for next lottery priority.

re: 1. think of horse racing. each bet is not aggregate, it has its own odds and pauout.

IF there is interest in Ghost Auction we could allocate a Whale Wednsday’s to walking through [https://app.auction.ghostchain.io].

If 5 people say Interested we do it. I thin kwe are at 3.