sealForge documentation

Auditable sealed-bid auctions on Zcash: the clearing price is public, the bidders aren’t. How these docs are organised and what the status labels mean.

Auditable sealed-bid auctions on Zcash: the clearing price is public, the bidders aren’t.

These pages are written for Zcash protocol and wallet engineers first. Every technical claim cites the code (path, function or constant) or an evidence file. Every behaviour carries a status label from the table below. The source of every page is in docs/site in the repository. The engineering documents in docs/ (PRD, TRD and the rest) are the design history these pages cite.

Status labels

Label	Meaning
Mainnet	Has run on Zcash mainnet. Nothing has yet.
Testnet	Has run on public Zcash testnet. The page cites the auction code and transactions
Regtest	Exercised end to end on the local Zebra + Zaino chain
Tested	Unit or integration tests only
Specified	Types or design exist, not built
Not built	Neither

Contents

1. Overview: what it is, status of every component, the three guarantees and what isn’t guaranteed
2. Protocol specification (SF1)
   • 2.1 Roles and what each one knows
   • 2.2 Lifecycle state machine
   • 2.3 Wire formats
   • 2.4 Commitments and domain separation
   • 2.5 Bid selection
   • 2.6 Clearing
   • 2.7 Refund privacy
3. Zcash integration reference: every protocol touchpoint, and the upstream dependency risks
4. Architecture and infrastructure
5. Security: trust assumptions, threat model, key custody, findings, mainnet gates
6. Verification and evidence: audit any auction, the testnet record, reproducibility, test inventory
7. Guides: organiser, trustee, bidder, auditor, integrator
8. API and SDK reference
9. Product and economics
10. Roadmap and mainnet gates
11. Open questions for reviewers

Appendices: glossary, test vectors, ZIP and spec index, changelog and memo versioning.

Conventions

• Amounts are integer zatoshi (1 ZEC = 10^8 zat). “TAZ” is testnet ZEC.
• ‖ is byte concatenation. u32 LE and u64 LE are little-endian unsigned integers.
• Paths are relative to the repository root. Code citations are to main at the commit these pages were written against (see the changelog).
• Upstream behaviour (Orchard, Ironwood, PCZT, RedPallas, note encryption, consensus) is cited to the ZIP, the protocol specification or the upstream source and version. It is not restated from memory.