How the auction works¶
Every Meadow quote is the result of a sealed-bid auction that ran while your request waited. Here's the mechanism.
Solvers¶
A solver is a bidder that knows how to turn your intent into yield at some set of venues. Solvers implement one contract: given an intent (asset, amount, chain, risk constraints), return a bid — the gross APY they can deliver and the settlement plan (the exact call batch) that achieves it. House solvers cover the venue registry; the design admits external solvers joining the same auctions.
The sealed-bid window¶
When your intent arrives, the auction broadcasts it to every solver and collects bids for a short, fixed window (on the order of a second). Bids are sealed: no solver sees another's bid, and late bids miss the window. That matters —
- no last-look: a solver can't wait to shade the leader by a hair, so bids are honest estimates of what the solver can actually deliver;
- no rate-anchoring: solvers can't collectively drift toward a lazy consensus number.
Solvers that fail health checks, can't serve the asset/chain, or violate your
constraints (riskTier, minApyBps, allowedVenues) simply don't bid.
Scoring: net, not gross¶
Bids are ranked by what you'd actually earn:
Fees are the bid's declared take (feeBps on the quote). Settlement gas — the
cost of executing the plan — is amortized over the deposit and subtracted, so a
venue that's expensive to enter must out-yield a cheap one to win. Ties and
near-ties consider the venue's risk score.
The winner becomes your quote¶
The best bid is returned as the quote: its economics (netApy, grossApy,
feeBps), its allocation, the winning solverId, and — critically — its
settlement plan compiled into the txPayload you sign. The quote is the bid;
there's no second pricing step between auction and settlement. It stays
executable until expiresAt, after which the market has moved and a fresh
auction is required.
Why per-deposit auctions¶
A posted-rate aggregator answers "what was the best venue recently, for a generic depositor". An auction answers "who pays the most for this deposit, now, net of the costs of getting it there" — which is the only question your money actually cares about. The price of that precision is a subsecond wait at quote time; the quickstart shows it end to end.