The event I was referencing turns out to have taken place in Denmark, not Holland, and was auctioning sugar beets, not tulips. They are using secure multiparty computation algorithms to auction sugar beet growing rights to farmers.
https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/aliaga/cs197-10/papers/boget...
The paper shows a practical use of secret sharing and secure multiparty computation to discover the market price of a commodity. Not sure how secure it is, but it's interesting.
It's not the same thing as securing consensus of a blockchain ledger. In the paper they have over a thousand participants and 3 (or some small number of) servers. In the blockchain problem, each participant runs his own server. The fault tolerance model is different, and also the blockchain requires continuous consensus.