Auction houses, engineered.
Sotheby's and Christie's shaped how the world buys art for three centuries. We build the digital-native successors — bidding floors, consignment ops, escrow and live event run-of-show — on Azure, .NET, Next.js and PostgreSQL. The HipHopGrails platform is our reference build.
The things we'll
actually ship.
- Server-authoritative bidding with anti-snipe, soft-close, proxy and absentee bids
- Live-streamed auctions with auctioneer paddle, online + room + phone bidders
- Consignment workflows for labels, artists, estates and curators
- Escrow, KYC, AML and payouts (Stripe Connect, ACH, specialist art-lending rails)
- Operator tooling — catalog, photography pipeline, run-of-show, telemetry
- Reference stack: Microsoft Azure, .NET 8 microservices, Next.js, PostgreSQL
Common
questions.
What auction platforms have you built?
+
HipHopGrails is the flagship — the breakout auction destination for hip-hop memorabilia and celebrity drops, often described as the Sotheby's of the streets. End-to-end on .NET 8 + Azure + Next.js + React Native + PostgreSQL.
What's special about engineering an auction platform?
+
The bidding engine is the product, not a CRUD app with a countdown. You need sub-100ms broadcast, server-authoritative state, anti-snipe and soft-close logic, immutable audit trails that survive subpoena, and live-event run-of-show tooling. We've solved all of it.
Why .NET and Azure for auctions instead of Node and AWS?
+
Azure SignalR Service handles 100k+ concurrent WebSocket connections out of the box. Azure AD B2C gives you per-jurisdiction KYC-bound identity. Azure SQL with always-encrypted columns gives you audit-grade compliance. For regulated high-value auctions, this stack is years ahead of the alternatives.