CoW Improvement Proposals (CIPs) that establish, modify, or discuss the solver competition: who can solve, how solutions are scored and ranked, how winners are chosen, rewards, fees, bonding, and enforcement/slashing. Captured 2026-06-18 for the BYOS exploration (BYOS RFP). Status/details summarized from forum search — open each link for authoritative text. The consolidated mechanics live in
solver-auctions.md.
| CIP | Title | What it changes / discusses |
|---|---|---|
| CIP-67 | Moving from batch auction to the fair combinatorial auction | The current core mechanism. Replaces single-winner batch auction with the FCA: per-directed-pair reference bids, filtering of underperforming batched bids, multiple winners. Higher throughput + stronger per-pair fairness guarantees. Most relevant to how BYOS bids win. |
| CIP-11 | Rules of the Solver Competition — status quo and update | Foundational competition rules: social-consensus (implicit) rules, global + local token-conservation constraints. |
| CIP-13 | Rules update: ban pennying | Prohibits pennying (deliberately inflating reported scores expecting rewards to cover losses). |
| CIP-38 | Solver Computed Fees & Rank by Surplus | Solvers compute their own "network fee" to cover gas; ranking moves to surplus-based. |
| CIP-72 | Aligning quoting and solving behavior of solvers | Addresses solvers giving over-optimistic quotes but not matching bids at solve time. Relevant to BYOS quote/solve consistency. |
| CIP | Title | What it changes / discusses |
|---|---|---|
| CIP-20 | Auction model for solver rewards | Establishes the auction-based (second-price) COW reward model for the competition winner. |
| CIP-34 | Testing Fee Models for CoW Protocol | Early experimentation with protocol fee models. |
| CIP-36 | Adjusting and renewing solver rewards budget | Renews the rewards budget (committed 8M COW for the competition). |
| CIP-48 | Solver rewards budget renewal & update of bonding pool operations | Budget renewal + introduces the 15% service fee on positive COW rewards for designated/bonding-pool solvers. |
| CIP-57 | Solver rewards on all chains | Extends rewards across all operating chains (mainnet, Gnosis, Arbitrum, …). |
| CIP-74 | Align Solver Rewards with Protocol Revenue + volume-based fee | Replaces fixed reward cap with a dynamic cap tied to protocol fees of the winning solution; adds a 2 bps unconditional volume fee. Directly shapes BYOS economics (the RFP's fee defaults to 0). See also the retrospective and the small-order second-price issue. |
| CIP-85 | Performance and Consistency Rewards | Current reward shape: fixes reward budget at 50% of protocol revenue; adds consistency rewards for reliable participation. |
- CIP-Draft: Align Solver Rewards with Protocol Revenue — hybrid model (solvers 25% of batch surplus when the protocol collects fees; users 50%, protocol 25%). Predecessor discussion to CIP-74.
- CIP-Draft: Distributing COW rewards on mainnet for all chains
| CIP | Title | What it changes / discusses |
|---|---|---|
| CIP-7 | Allowing External Solvers | Establishes bonding pools ($500k + 1.5M COW Safe owned by CoW DAO); pool creators signal liability to allow-list solver addresses. The mechanism BYOS itself is bonded under. |
| CIP-44 | Reduced bonding requirements | Reduced bonding pool ($50k + 500k COW, scaling up) granting full calldata/submission control; still vouched under the DAO pool. A likely path for BYOS. |
| CIP-52 | EBBO (fairness) specs, reimbursement & escalation | Defines EBBO violation certificates, reimbursement, and slashing escalation. Defines BYOS's liability surface. |
| CIP-55 | Slashing of the GlueX solver | Concrete precedent: a solver slashed for misbehavior — illustrates real enforcement. |
| CIP-78 | Dissolve Sprinter Bonding Pool | Example of the pool-dissolution process in practice. |
| CIP-Draft | Simplifying the operations of the CoW DAO bonding pool | Ongoing discussion on bonding-pool operations. |
- CIP-67 — the FCA mechanism BYOS must win under.
- CIP-85 + CIP-74 — current reward/fee economics (the RFP says BYOS keeps 100% of rewards, fee defaults to 0).
- CIP-7 / CIP-44 — bonding pool BYOS operates under.
- CIP-52 — EBBO/slashing, i.e. BYOS's liability if a sub-solver's proposal harms users.
- CIP-72 — quote/solve consistency, relevant to proposal re-simulation.
Note: CIP numbers/status evolve. Re-check the forum's Governance and Closed Proposals categories for anything newer than the capture date.