Artist-owned auction contracts

What the contract does

An auction house contract holds NFTs you list, accepts ETH bids, enforces the reserve price and the 5% minimum bid increment, extends the auction by 15 minutes when a bid lands in the final 15 minutes (anti-snipe), and settles by sending the NFT to the winning bidder and the ETH to you, minus any protocol fee that was set when the contract was deployed.

One contract per owner. One auction per token at a time. ETH-only. ERC-721 only.

Who deploys it

You do. A factory contract handles the deployment. You sign one transaction and you get back an auction house contract that is yours. The transaction is cheap because the factory uses a minimal-proxy clone, so the per-deploy cost is closer to a token transfer than to deploying a full contract.

The factory only lets one auction house exist per wallet. If you already have one, the factory will point you to it instead of deploying a second.

Who owns it

The wallet that called the factory. That is locked at deploy time. The owner cannot be transferred and cannot be renounced. PND has no admin role, no upgrade path, no pause switch, and no ability to change any of the contract’s parameters after deployment.

If you want different terms, you deploy a new contract under a different wallet from a different factory.

How listing works

You call createAuction on your house with the NFT’s contract address, its token ID, a duration, and a reserve price. The contract takes custody of the NFT in the same transaction.

The clock does not start when you list. It starts on the first bid that meets the reserve. Before that first bid, you can edit the reserve price, cancel the auction, or just leave it sitting.

How bidding works

Anyone can bid. The first bid must meet or beat the reserve. Every later bid must beat the current high bid by at least 5%. When a new bid lands, the previous bidder is automatically refunded their ETH in the same transaction.

If a bid arrives in the last 15 minutes, the auction extends by another 15 minutes. This keeps sniping at the last second from being a winning strategy.

If a refund to a previous bidder ever fails (some smart-contract wallets reject the direct send), the refund is held inside the contract and that bidder can withdraw it at any time.

How settlement works

After the timer runs out, anyone can call endAuction. That single transaction transfers the NFT to the winning bidder and sends the ETH to you, minus the protocol fee if one was set when your house was deployed. The factory PND deploys from today sets that fee to zero.

You do not have to be the one to settle. A collector, observer, or PND’s frontend can call it on your behalf. Once settled, the slot is cleared and you can list the same token again later if you want.

What PND’s frontend does

The frontend is a convenience layer. It lets you deploy your house in one click, list NFTs without opening a block explorer, browse other artists’ houses, place bids, see live activity, and settle auctions. There is also a per-artist site template that reads a single house directly, so an artist can point collectors at their own URL.

The frontend reads the contracts. It is not in the path of any transaction. Bids are signed by the bidder and sent to the contract directly. ETH and NFTs never pass through PND.

What happens if PND’s frontend disappears

The auction contracts keep working.

You can list, cancel, settle, recover stuck tokens, and edit reserves directly against the contract from a block explorer or any wallet’s contract-interaction view. Bidders can place bids, withdraw failed refunds, and trigger settlement the same way. The contracts have no dependency on PND being online.

Anyone can also build a new frontend on top of the same contracts. The factory and the houses are public and permissionless to read. Other interfaces can coexist with PND’s, replace it, or specialize in a slice of it.

Why this is useful

You own the selling layer for your own work. The contract cannot be reassigned away from you, the fee is whatever was set at deploy and cannot be raised on you, and listings cannot be silently removed by a third party. If a platform you previously sold through closes, takes a listing down, or changes terms, none of that affects auctions that live in your own contract.

Provenance reads cleanly too. The collector record points at your contract, not at a marketplace router.

Tradeoffs vs a shared platform contract

A shared marketplace already has an audience, a search index, a feed, and a brand collectors recognize. An artist-owned contract has whoever the artist brings. Distribution is the honest tradeoff.

You also take on a little operational responsibility. You (or your collector, or PND’s frontend) call settle, you decide reserves, you decide when to list. The contract will not chase a buyer for you.

Liquidity does not pool. Your house is not part of a global order book. For some artists that is a feature; for others it is a real cost.

A platform can still add taste, curation, context, and a collector relationship around your contract. Those things do not require owning the contract itself. Artist-owned contracts are about removing the dependency on any single platform existing forever, not about replacing what platforms actually do well.

Getting started

Deploy your house at /auction/new. If you want a dedicated site for your auctions, see /sites.