Why Your Inference Endpoint Needs a Cryptoeconomic Firewall

Your public endpoint is a free-for-all for searchers and arbitrage bots, leading to extracted value and degraded user experience.

• Front-running and sandwich attacks siphon user funds.
• Network congestion from spam degrades performance for legitimate users.
• Unpredictable latency makes consistent dApp performance impossible.

Without a cost barrier, endpoints are vulnerable to denial-of-wallet attacks that drain provider credits and cause downtime.

• Sybil actors spam requests to exhaust rate limits and API keys.
• Cost asymmetry: Attacker spends pennies, you pay thousands in infrastructure bills.
• Service degradation impacts all your users, not just the attacker.

A staking-and-slashing layer that authenticates requests, prioritizes traffic, and financially disincentivizes abuse.

• Staked identity: Users bond assets to access premium endpoints, making sybil attacks economically irrational.
• Priority lanes: Staked users get guaranteed low-latency, high-throughput access.
• Automated slashing: Malicious traffic is filtered and the bond is slashed, funding protocol security.

A secure, prioritized communication layer is foundational for UniswapX, CowSwap, and cross-chain solvers.

• Enables intent propagation: Solvers require reliable, low-latency access to multiple chains.
• Protects solver economics: Prevents spam from disrupting complex cross-chain arbitrage calculations.
• Complements Across and LayerZero: Provides the secure off-chain messaging layer their architectures assume.

Monetize endpoint access while improving service quality, transforming infrastructure from a pure expense into a sustainable business model.

• Tiered access models: Free public tier, staked premium tier, enterprise SLAs.
• Revenue from staking yields: Protocol earns fees on staked assets securing the network.
• Reduced operational overhead: Automated slashing and filtering lower support and infra costs.

Public goods require sustainable funding models. A cryptoeconomic firewall aligns incentives, ensuring high-quality infrastructure without relying on altruism.

• Solves the free-rider problem: Users who value the service pay for it, directly or via staking.
• Creates a vested community: Stakers are incentivized to maintain network health and governance.
• Paves the way for decentralized RPC networks that are robust, scalable, and economically secure.

Unprotected inference is a free option for searchers. A malicious validator can censor, reorder, or front-run your model's outputs to extract value, corrupting agent logic.

• Attack Vector: Sandwich attacks on agent-initiated swaps via UniswapX or 1inch.
• Impact: >99% reliability requirement for autonomous agents becomes impossible.
• Mitigation: Commit-Reveal schemes and encrypted mempools.

Inference results that feed on-chain price oracles create a single point of failure. Adversaries can poison training data or DDOS the endpoint to create false signals.

• Attack Vector: Chainlink or Pyth nodes querying a compromised LLM for market sentiment.
• Impact: Cascading liquidations and >10% market swings from corrupted data.
• Mitigation: Decentralized inference networks with stake-slashing, akin to EigenLayer AVS design.

You cannot have decentralized, secure, and low-latency inference simultaneously. Sacrificing decentralization for speed invites cartel formation and creates a Solana-style reliability crisis.

• Core Trade-off: ~500ms latency requires centralized providers, breaking cryptoeconomic guarantees.
• Real-World Failure: Aptos or Sui Move modules waiting on a downed AWS endpoint.
• Solution: Probabilistic finality with fraud proofs, inspired by Optimism's fault proofs.

Inference is computationally expensive. An adversary can spam your endpoint with costly prompts, draining your operational budget and causing denial-of-service.

• Attack Cost: <$100 in gas to trigger >$10k in inference compute costs.
• Amplification: Similar to Ethereum's gas griefing, but with real-world AWS bills.
• Defense: Proof-of-work client puzzles and staked payment channels, like Solana's priority fee design.

Your standard load balancer can't see a sandwich attack. A cryptoeconomic firewall inspects transaction intent and simulates outcomes to block predatory MEV extraction before it hits the public mempool.\n- Blocks frontrunning, sandwich, and arbitrage bots\n- Protects user transaction value from ~$1B+ in annual extracted MEV\n- Integrates with Flashbots Protect and private RPC networks

IP-based rate limiting is useless against distributed botnets. A cryptoeconomic firewall uses stake-weighted or pay-per-call models, forcing attackers to put real capital at risk for spam.\n- Enforces costs via gas fees or staked slashing conditions\n- Prevents DDoS and spam that can incur $10k+/hr in infrastructure costs\n- Aligns with models like Ethereum's PBS and Solana's priority fees

Blindly forwarding a eth_sendRawTransaction is negligent. The firewall should decode, classify, and route transactions based on intent (e.g., swap, bridge, NFT mint) to optimal execution venues like UniswapX, CowSwap, or Across.\n- Routes to optimal venue, reducing slippage by 10-50 bps\n- Aggregates liquidity across DEXs, AMMs, and Bridges\n- Leverages solvers and intent-centric architectures

An inference endpoint with private key access is a high-value honeypot. A firewall must enforce transaction simulation and policy checks (allowlists, gas caps, contract interactions) before signing, treating the RPC like a hardened wallet.\n- Simulates all txns pre-signing to prevent rekt\n- Enforces enterprise security policies and compliance\n- Prevents $100M+ hacks from compromised API keys

Sending all read calls to a full archive node is like using a supercomputer for arithmetic. A firewall intelligently routes queries: recent blocks to standard nodes, historical data to archive nodes, and batched requests to specialized providers.\n- Cuts infrastructure costs by 30-60%\n- Dynamically routes based on data freshness and complexity\n- Integrates with POKT Network, BlastAPI, and Chainstack

Regulators (OFAC, MiCA) don't care about your tech stack—they see your RPC facilitating sanctioned transactions. A cryptoeconomic firewall provides on-chain policy enforcement, audit trails, and sanctions screening at the protocol layer.\n- Automates regulatory compliance for enterprise clients\n- Provides immutable logs for audits and reporting\n- Blocks interactions with sanctioned addresses (e.g., Tornado Cash relays)