Fast-path flow

Besides the usual auctions that take place at CoW Protocol, there is a special type of flow, called fast-path flow, where the competition among solvers is moved to the quoting stage. Specifically, there is a special enableFastPath flag in each quote request that, when enabled, implies the following. If this quote results in an order being signed by a user, then the quoter that provided this winning quote is automatically declared winner of the solver competition. In such a case, the following flow is triggered:

Winning quoter receives a /settle call from the protocol, together with the exact amounts it needs to deliver onchain to the user, right after the order is created.
If the winning quoter fails to execute the order onchain within the given deadline, the order becomes available in all future auctions that will be created (i.e., falls back to the usual flow).

One can view the above as a single-order auction that takes place at the quoting stage. This implies that all rules and accounting around auctions that were described in previous sections apply to such auctions as well. Spefically, each quote response in the quoting stage is treated as a bid in this single-order auction, and the winning quoter needs to execute their bid as is. Moreover, all other bids are used to compute the reference score, and reference score as well as rewards (in case the winning quoter executes the order onchain within the deadline) or penalties (in case the winning quote fails to execute the order onchain within the deadline) can be computed as in previous sections.

We note that currently the penalty cap for these fast-path orders is set to zero, and the settle deadline for fast-path auctions is:

Mainnet: 1 block
Gnosis chain: 1 block
Arbitrum: 8 blocks
Base: 1 block
Avalanche: 2 blocks
Polygon: 2 blocks
BNB: 5 blocks
Linea: 1 block
Plasma: 2 blocks
Ink: 2 blocks