Simple Summary
The previous solver rewards budget was defined and approved in CIP-23, over five months ago, effectively becoming available on Tuesday, February 28, 2023. The 10M COW tokens allocated for this purpose are now almost depleted, after the payout that took place on Tuesday, August 1, 2023.
This CIP is intended to propose a renewal of the solver rewards program by allocating an additional 10M COW tokens, projected to last 6 months; specifically, from Tuesday, August 1, 2023 until Tuesday, January 30, 2024.
Motivation
There are 16 running solvers at the time of writing, consistently competing to provide the best possible solutions to the batch auctions the protocol is running every few seconds, and consequently ensuring best execution for CoW Protocol users. It is safe to assume that a major motive for running a solver is winning solver rewards. This proposal aims to ensure appropriate funding to continue rewarding solvers and hence supporting a competitive solver landscape.
The projected estimate presented in CIP-23 was six months, suggesting that the COW tokens allocated should suffice until Tuesday, August 28, 2023. Expenditure on solver rewards since then has closely followed the estimations in CIP-23, except for a few weeks in March and early April where some spikes were observed. As a consequence of these spikes, the COW tokens allocated are almost depleted after the payout that took place on Tuesday, August 1, 2023. This means that the the initial estimate was off by 4 weeks.
Since the launch of CIP-20 on Tuesday, March 21, 2023, and again with the exception of a few weeks, the weekly expenditure is following closely the projected “10M COW per 6 months” estimate. In fact, with the launch of CIP-27, which reallocated part of the solver rewards to the price estimation competition, there has been an unintentional gradual correction in the budget, as solver teams are still preparing their solvers to become price estimators, thus resulting in reduced expenditure over the last few weeks. This suggests that, in fact, 10M COW will most likely suffice for the first 6 months after CIP-20 was enabled. (Here is a relevant Dune query that allows to track expenses in a given time window).
The above gives us confidence that 10M COW is indeed a good estimate for the next 6 months as well, and thus, this CIP proposes to allocate an additional 10M COW to be used for solver rewards, and estimates that this amount should suffice until Tuesday, January 30, 2024 (starting the accounting on Tuesday, August 1, 2023).
As with previous related CIPs, It is important to note that this budgeting proposal is independent of additional proposals to potentially change the solver reward structure, which can be configured for appropriate spending according to the budget.
Specification
Transfer 10M COW from CoW DAO (0xca771eda0c70aa7d053ab1b25004559b918fe662) to the Solver Rewards safe (0xA03be496e67Ec29bC62F01a428683D7F9c204930)
Rationale
Solver rewards are planned to continue using the same operational structure, carried out from the solver rewards safe. ETH for compensating gas execution costs is estimated to be fully covered by collecting fees from users.
It is proposed to allocate 10M COW tokens for a 6 month period of rewards. This represents a yearly budget of 20M COW tokens, 2% of the COW token supply, valued at $1.35M according to current market price.
Safe Transaction Data
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