Solvers

This article explains how third parties, referred to as solvers, can use mev-commit as a tool to offer commitment services to users. By offering commitments, solvers can fulfill a range of user requests, from basic operations such as a preconfirmation for a fast bundle inclusion in the chain to complex operations involving multiple chains. Solvers aim to abstract these detailed processes from end-users, who may lack the expertise to perform these operations independently. Here we discuss how solvers can help users secure commitments for their transaction bundle.

Commitments serve various purposes. They can benefit a searcher looking to profit from an arbitrage opportunity by getting a preconfirmation or a regular user wanting to sell assets on Ethereum while buying assets on Solana at the same time. We anticipate sophisticated actors to interact directly with mev-commit to request and acquire the necessary commitments from providers to fulfill their needs, abstracting the commitment bidding and receiving process from end users.

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Sourcing and Handling Commitments

The solver leader interacts with its users and the mev-commit protocol by receiving user’s messages and transforming them into mev-commit bids. The solver then tries to source commitments for the bid on the mev-commit protocol. Once the commitments are successfully acquired, there are three main ways the solver can handle them. We describe each of them next.

1. The solver accumulates the commitments it receives for each bid and it only sends a commitment to the user if/when it manages to source commitments from all the providers for a bid. In this case, we say the commitment is credible as it was issued by all the providers in mev-commit.
2. The solver relays all the commitments it receives from the providers back to the user. In this case, the commitments the user gets are “weak commitments” because they are tied to specific providers, unlike the credible commitment from above.
3. The solver can immediately send a commitment to the user (if it chooses to) even before getting commitments from the providers. In this case, the solver issues a commitment to the user optimistically and is responsible for sourcing the commitments from all the providers. If the solver cannot source the commitments from the providers, it may be penalized by having its collateral slashed.

The approaches mentioned above would most likely differ in the economical aspects and should be priced differently by the solver. An interesting future direction is to analyze the game-theoretical aspects that each approach encompasses. For instance, understanding the strategies and trade-offs a solver must consider when deciding how to manage their bids and commitments, or how different pricing models might affect the user experience and the overall efficiency of the process.