We have already deeply discussed the solver risks and evaluated exactly how they would be mitigated with the tiered per-trade reward scoring. Currently the solvers have greater risk since there is no correlation between the reward and the likely hood of incurring failed transactions or high slippage on large trades. Furthermore, on average the solver costs due to risk factors are substantially lower than the actual reward.
I do not see how this is the case, solvers would still be rewarded with a metric that is partially in correspondence with the number of batches (just giving more weight to the number of trades in a batch).
This capped rewards mechanism is both meant to make the rewards program more deterministically sustainable while also ensuring that the protocol doesn’t burn too much capital while adoption is still underway.
It is important to remember that, in order for the COW token to become more valuable, the protocol itself must generate revenue. This revenue is meant to be directed back to the token to sustain/increase its valuation. This can be done in the form of buyback programs, etc… There is a fine balance between the number of tokens being distributed and the protocol’s ability to sustainably bring value to it.