Why Sloppy Fee Distribution Erodes Relayer Network Health

Uses a unified auction where relayers compete on speed and cost, with fees paid only to the winning relayer. This eliminates the tragedy of the commons where many relayers are paid for idle work.

• Key Benefit: >90% of fees go to the active, winning relayer.
• Key Benefit: Creates a liquid, competitive market for cross-chain liquidity, attracting professional market makers.

Separates the roles of messaging (Oracle/Relayer) and execution (DApp). The protocol explicitly defines and enforces fee splits for verifiers, preventing applications from capturing all value.

• Key Benefit: Creates a sustainable revenue stream for decentralized oracle and relayer networks.
• Key Benefit: Incentive alignment ensures verifiers are compensated for security-critical work, not just front-end apps.

While an intent-based solution, its Dutch auction design obscures fee distribution to off-chain fillers. This creates a black box where filler health is unknown and susceptible to centralization.

• Key Problem: No on-chain visibility into filler profitability or network resilience.
• Key Problem: Risk of filler oligopoly if only a few can afford to participate in loss-leading auctions.

Implements a fee management system where user fees are pooled and distributed to decentralized oracle and router networks based on pre-defined, auditable on-chain logic.

• Key Benefit: Predictable, reliable payments for infrastructure providers, enabling long-term operational planning.
• Key Benefit: Abstraction for users—pay in any token, with the system handling complex cross-chain fee conversion and distribution.

Frameworks like CowSwap and UniswapX shift the burden from users (transactions) to solvers (intents). This creates a clear, auction-based market for execution where solvers must internalize all costs, including relay fees.

• Key Benefit: Fee distribution becomes a solver's problem, forcing them to efficiently source liquidity and relay services.
• Key Benefit: Competition among solvers drives innovation in fee optimization and relayer partnerships.

Protocols like Flashbots SUAVE or MEV-sharing bridges propose redistributing extracted value. This fails because it subsidizes infrastructure with volatile, predatory revenue, not sustainable fees.

• Key Problem: MEV is unpredictable and adversarial, making it unfit for paying for core, reliable infrastructure.
• Key Problem: Incentivizes relayers to prioritize extractable transactions, degrading service for ordinary users.

First-price sealed-bid auctions, common in early designs, create a toxic environment where only the largest relayers profit. This starves smaller nodes and kills network resilience.

• Creates relayer oligopolies with >70% market share.
• Leads to strategic underbidding and bid sniping, increasing user latency.
• Results in ~30% of relayers operating at a loss, causing churn.

Decouple fee payment from execution. Users submit intents with a fee; solvers compete on net outcome, not just gas. Fees are distributed fairly based on value added.

• Proposer-Builder-Separation (PBS) principles prevent frontrunning.
• Enables cross-domain MEV capture to subsidize costs.
• Protocols like Across use this to fund a sustainable, decentralized relay network.

When relay fees are bundled into a single transaction or abstracted away, the value flow becomes invisible. This prevents honest competition and allows infrastructure providers to extract rents.

• Zero transparency on fee breakdown between sequencers, proposers, and relayers.
• Leads to hidden premiums of 5-15% over base chain gas costs.
• Erodes trust; users can't audit if they're getting fair value.

Implement on-chain fee registries and split contracts. Every component's cut is programmatically defined and visible, enforced by smart contracts.

• LayerZero's Oracle and Relayer roles have explicit, claimable fee streams.
• Enables composable revenue models where relayers are paid for specific work (e.g., attestation vs. execution).
• Allows DAO-governed fee parameters to adjust incentives dynamically.

Static fee models break during congestion. If relayers cannot dynamically price risk (e.g., during a chain reorg or gas spike), they stop servicing requests, causing network-wide failure.

• Results in service blackouts for less profitable chains or routes.
• Creates risk mispricing where relayers overcharge in calm periods to hedge.
• Manifests as >50% failed transactions during high volatility.

Integrate real-time data oracles for cost and risk. Relay fees auto-adjust based on destination chain gas, latency demands, and security guarantees.

• EIP-1559-like mechanisms for base fee + priority fee for relayers.
• Risk-weighted pricing for different bridge security models (e.g., light client vs. multisig).
• Enables surge pricing during events, keeping the network alive but expensive.