The Solver Competition: Master the Ultimate Algorithm Battle & Become a Solver - Mariia Keiko

Transcript

[Music] [Music] What an intro. Thank you so much, Tara. That's really a pleasure to be here with all of you. And how are you doing today? Perfect. Hi everyone. My name is Maria. I'm leading uh people operations and recruitment at cow and today my goal is to provide you a short intro about cow about the products we have and dive deeper into the some exciting stuff which we have since last week which is

fair auction and also explain you a bit more how to become a solver and perhaps even motivate you to become one of them. What is cowo? Cowo is decentralized autonomous organization of developers, market makers and community members with a mission and a vision to provide the most user-friendly and productive products in the ecosystem and to make device safe and seamless for everyone no matter if you have crypto background or you are new to that. Cowda has three products. The first one is cow protocol with cow's swap UI on top of it. What's that? It's

leading intentbased trading protocol and I would dive deeper into that just in a second. The second product we have is KMM which is the first M capturing AMM deployed on Ethereum. Basically, it's a liquidity pool. And the third product which I highly recommend you to have a look at is M blocker which is a leading RPC protection mechanism on Ethereum. It's basically a bot which you you can connect to your wallet and if you're trading on some other platforms rather than cow protocol it can save you from the memes. Let's talk a bit more about cow protocol. As I mentioned it's already in 10 as I already mentioned it's in

10based dex aggregation protocol and uh cow protocol leverage intense run fair combator auctions and the largest solver network in defy to bring surplus capturing. We are also providing the mu protection for everyone who is trading on cow protocol. What is intentbased architecture? We all talk about that. We all say that this is super important. But what's that actually? When the user comes to cow swap UI, they define the intent by specifying the sell token, buy token, amount to sell, and the slippage tolerance, but they don't specify the

specific execution path they want to proceed with. In that moment, the solvers step in and they compete to fulfill this intent offering the best possible price for the users and with that taking all the risk of the user and delegating to themsel. In summary, cow swap provides uh safety for the users and they don't need to think about how the trade will be executed because the solvers the one who responsible for the execution pass and bearing all the risk. Why intent matters? There are many

things I would like to highlight today few of them. So first of all it's simple UX. simpler UX users describe what they want, not have to get it. So they don't need to understand the contracts, the protocols and so on. With that, we want to come closer to the mass adoption and to engage lots of different types of users, not necessarily even those who are cryptonative. The second one is gasless trading. It doesn't mean that you don't need to have gas, but what it means that all gas fees paid from um paid in the cell token so you can save your precious is. The next one is no fees for failed

transactions. You shouldn't pay for what you uh what didn't work, what you haven't received. Obviously, execute multiple trades at once. And of course ecosystem innovation with the solvers uh competing through matching intents. There might be lots of interesting solutions for the users as well. Cal protocol pro protects you from mess. M stands for maximum extractable value. You can read more about this one. And what mv blocker does on cow protocol. basically saves your assets, saves your money from front end,

back end and sandwich attacks from the bots. Sandwich means both front end and back end as well. Cow protocol provides you the surplus on top. That's something what I was mentioning at the beginning and I would like you to provide you a bit more information about that since this is very important and this is one big benefit I believe for the users who are trading on cow protocol. The surplus um means that you receive something on top from um the minimum amount you expected. You can see the real examples here and you can see what is the surplus

from the trade cow swap. Let's talk a bit more about the ferico auction and also the solver competition play role in that. How many of you have seen this UI? K team obviously. Okay. So many of them many of you this is a very straightforward our favorite UI of cow swap what you see here is basically the asset you want to trade you also specify the minimum you want to receive and that's it after you wait when the all the magic is

happening and in the end once your trade is executed you you hear our iconic moo Moo sound, right? We still love it. And what's happening behind the scene, it's way more complex. This is I try to explain what's happening behind the scene. However, there's again just some information. There are multiple details around what in is indeed happening in the UX. Once you go to cow swap UI, you specify what you want to trade and all the intents in the same

moment. All the other users who are trading the same moment as you do gathering and collecting in the order book. After you can see that there is another stage which are solvers and in the afterpilot there is happening um in order book there is happening um solver competition. The way have solvers can compete it's um quite complex. There are various mechanisms. They basically can connect to the liquidity pool. They can they can connect to another pier. That's also what's um our acronym cow stands for coincidence of wants. When you have

what I want, I have what you want. So peer-to-peer trading or it can be connected with a liquidity pool or with the other peer basically ring trade in that mechanism. it's uh very happening some other stuff which I'll explain in the in the minute and the winning solutions they are submitted through the driver on chain in the past the way how the solvers were competing it uh we used a specific algorithm which we called batch auction. What is a batch auction? A batch auction is a trading mechanism

where multiple orders are collected together. It's not like one order um at different time but all the intents all the orders they collected and executed together at once in batches rather than proh proceeding each trade individually in real time. With that multiple trade intense auctioned off simultaneously and each solver propose a price for each trade and the batch and the solution which they want to provide for the intense the best solution wins. What is the problem with the batch auction? The thing is that traditional batch auction select a single winning

solution which can limit the number of trades executed in parallel solution exist. We gave some study. We we took some time to investigate what can we do differently and how can we do it how can we do it differently to speed up our trading to provide better price for our users and leverage our solver competition in general. Solution which we found is fericcom auction. The goal is to increase the pro the protocol throughput and provide stronger fairness guarantees to traders to the

users with the fair commentary auction and I want to tell you that this is something very unique uh founded by implemented by cow and we start using that uh from May 21st. You can read more information about the fericometer auction in CIP67 and you can download all the links in the cure code which I will share with you in the end of the talk and the reason why we decided to proceed with the fercom auction again because of the better prices because of the faster execution the stronger fairness guarantees solving um the surplus

distrib distribution issue and uh what I mean by that imagine we have two users who are having exactly the same traits at the exactly the same time and um the surplus the question is there and uh sometimes uh solvers were hesitating what exactly surplus do we need to give to um both of those user should be the same should be different and so on quite often It was quite different and with the Fercom auction how it would work right now it it will work that they receive the same surplus on top if they trading in the same time we will have

multiple winners per auction that gives to the solvers to to submit multiple solutions at the same time. With that we will have also more creative solutions. We will have the solutions from other solvers who are working on again like on peer-to-peer trading and uh matching peers and proposing those solutions they that they wouldn't necessarily propose in the past because in the past they could propose only one solution and if they were hesitating hesitating about the second solution which was even more creative they would submit the solution which they believe will win in this certain moment.

and winner selection algorithms enable enables a unified order book across all chains. We are at the moment on four chains and we plan to scale and to have more chains uh joining more chains to have um more users and um with that we don't need to have the order book which I was mentioning in the previous slides for each chain separately but what we can do we can have we will have one order book for all of them it will simplify a lot for us. So let's have a look once again. And to sum it up, the fur commit auction is

happening in that uh in in the middle basically where the um the solver competition is part of the fur um committer auction when there are multiple solutions can win. What is solver competition in few words? It's basically a game which is played every few seconds. There is also another cap which you can have a look at. And the purpose of the solver competition is rapid execution the centralization. So it's not like everything is decided by cow protocol but actually we have multiple solvers who are proposing various solutions for the users that we call the

centralization and we also solving complex challenges instead of submitting the trade to another liquidity pool. We are proposing lots of various creative solutions and also including the tokens which are new to the market. Right? It's also quite hard to sometimes to include them but that's part of the solver competition. I'm very proud to say that right now we have 31 active solvers.

It's double since the last year even even slightly more. Uh a year ago we had 14 solvers. Right now we have 31. So it's grew a lot. We are very proud of it. And what I would like to mention that those solvers who join the solver competition they stay there. Only few of them left at the very beginning but um majority of them stay stays and we are very proud of it. We do our best to support them when when it's needed. And you also can see where are we based on what chains which is mainetossis base and outro. You also can see how many solvers are on the multiple chains becoming a solver. So this is the

juicy part which I also would like to let you know and possibly motivate you to become one of our solvers. Before that I would like to understand I would like to provide you more information why to become a solver what is the reason behind of that there are many of them I would like to specify and highlight a few of them first of all you'll receive uh you will have an impact you deliver better prices to the users and make every trade a win for them you will get rewarded by the DAO and you can see the amount amount which we provided to the solvers during the first year, during the second year

and during the third. You can see that during the second and third year we provided 16 millions of cows which is less than the first year but indeed it's more because the cow token price uh was much higher during the second and third year than the first one. So in total it's much more than during the first one. And also the last one you will put uh more strength into the herd cow herd and help make the protocol more decentralized and robust. This is something what we are working on. We want to ensure that our products, our operations are more and more decentralized. We want to have more and more community members, users, uh

contributors, uh quarter members joining cow and making defi seamless and better for all. We are open for having few more solvers. If you're one of them, please uh let me know. Before I proceed with more information, I wonder if anyone of you already tried to become a solver. No. Okay. There are few steps how you can become the solver. First one, you talk to the core team and I will also share more information how to do that and the cure code in the end of the talk. You

set up the bonding pool and you hop in or you can join the existing cow uh bonding pool. You can see that the numbers for the bonding pool is quite high. I believe it's half a million of USDC plus 1.5 millions cow DAO tokens. And you would ask why do we need to provide this amount to the cow? So first of all we don't take those money they are on hold. The reason why we need that because if you have your own driver you

have access to a very sensitive information of the users. you basically get the direct access to the settlement contract and um this is super important, super risky and we want to ensure that we provide to our users the best security possible that they feel secured with us supported and they don't bear any risk. The second one is we want to avoid malicious solvers and there are many reasons and many ways how the solver can become malicious. Of course there are many other reasons but those one those two are the biggest one which I would like

to highlight. If you don't have your own bonding pool, if you don't have this sum of assets, you can join cow bonding pool which is already exist. The onboarding process includes a few steps. You can see them here. I won't go uh through I I won't go uh through them. We also have the reuse B bonding pool but all only for those solvers who are already with us or you can join with scout um bonding pool and after proceed after some time with reduced bonding

requirements. There is specific requirements you also can go through the CIP44 to read more about that. I would like you to scan this code if you are interested to read more and to learn more about all the information which I mentioned. Lots of links are there as well as um the information about how to become a solver and um any other so take some time. I also would like to let you know that we are hiring we are sca scaling

our team and uh as I mentioned at the beginning I'm leading people operations and recruitment. So if you have any questions not only about the solvers but also about recruitment feel free to come and talk to me I would be very happy. I also like to let you know that we have the referral bonus. If you haven't found the role which is you you're interested in and you know someone who might be suitable for the opening roles we have you um can refer them to us and in case they proceed everything is good then you receive your referral bonus which is up to 6K USDC.

uh let's stay in touch. I'm more than happy to talk to you after the talk or during the next few days. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Telegram, Twitter and ask me any questions you might have. And that's all from my side. Very grateful to be here. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you so much, Maria from Cowal. That was a uh I mentioned I'm an archaeologist, so that $6,000 is looking great. that would cover the rent and all my research. That's fantastic. So, I'm going to sign up to that. Um, any questions for Maria? Please use that opportunity. No. God, come on. You got to you got to engage, guys. Um, I'm

going to engage. Um, what is uh you mentioned a lot of amazing stuff that you're doing right now. What is something what does the future have in store for cow? What is something that you would like to achieve in the next say a little bit of time? Thank you so much for the question Sarah. The great question. Great question. I believe we we want to do a lot of things but we also want to be very mindful of the resources and time we have. So we like to focus instead of doing everything at the same time. Few um steps after having the fericcom auction on place we work more in depths on the decentralization of our products. Something would also mentioned uh already during my talk. We also planning to grow and to to be on

different chains. So we put lots of efforts into that and of course all of us leveraging our products getting more users with the fericcom auction. Uh that's one way how we plan to get more users and we indeed want to have very different users those who are the cryptonative those who doesn't understand at all how the UX works and they don't need to but because of our seamless UI they can easily understand what they need to click on and how to get their execution done. Thank you so much. Fantastic. Thank you so much. One more round of applause for Maria from Cow. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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