Abstract

Solver capital requirements increase incrementally for each additional chain they support. Everclear reduces the cost of inventory rebalancing, but does not reduce this incremental capital requirement for solvers.

This proposal presents a simple solution to this problem - an Inventory Access Layer. Here we outline the problem in detail, and define a simple MVP that can be built to prove our solution and bring value to the Everclear ecosystem.

tldr;

Build an inventory access layer that solvers rebalancing through Everclear can utilize Allow solvers to access inventory for lower cost than holding fragmented inventory Allow Liquidity Providers to contribute to inventory and charge fees to solvers for access. LP’s can range from individual asset holders to large DAO treasuries.

Nomial Overview

Nomial is an inventory access layer that allows advanced agents (which we will refer to as solvers) to access inventory on multiple chains without having to hold inventory on those chains. This reduces cost and capital requirements for solvers by allowing them to keep their inventory unified on one chain rather than fragmented across many chains.

Solvers pay fees to LP’s for access to inventory. Nomial allows solvers and LP’s to interact trustlessly. Nomial’s goal is to align the incentives of solvers and LP’s, which will ultimately reduce costs for the end-users that solvers are filling for.

Purpose

The purpose of our proposal is to provide low-cost inventory access to solvers that use Everclear.

It is prohibitively risky and costly for solvers to hold their own inventory on multiple chains for a few reasons:

Solvers need to purchase and hold assets on the chains they fill on. This introduces significant price risk that generally outweighs their profits, particularly for long tail assets. Solver owned inventory needs to be spread and balanced across all of the chains they fill on. Adding support for more chains increases their capital requirements Solver inventory has high opportunity cost when underutilized. Utilization of their private inventory for fills will be far less than 100%, especially for newly deployed chains. Nomial will reduce risk and costs for solvers by allowing them to access inventory from liquidity pools on demand. LP’s earn fees when solvers utilize the pools.

Architecture

Nomial will include 2 main components:

Inventory Access Pools - smart contracts that all LP’s to contribute capital for solvers to access. Nomial Validator - an off-chain service responsible for maintaining the state of each solver’s access and repayment status on all supported chains. Solvers request a Collateral Proof from this service in order to access inventory.

Inventory Access Transaction Flow

Solvers using Nomial will interact with inventory access pools to fill intents originating from intents-based bridges (such as Across). Inventory access pools are funded by LP’s.

Solvers will repay on the same chain where they access inventory. Solvers using Nomial will request repayment on the destination chain from Everclear. This simplifies the solver’s interactions by allowing them to access and repay on the same chain.

Here is a breakdown of the flow pictured in this diagram:

1a) User sends intent - User sends an intent to bridge from chain Y → chain X to an intent-based bridge (Across)

1b) Solver wins bid - Solver wins the bid for the user’s intent. Solver is now obligated to fill the user’s intent on chain X

2a) Solver access inventory - After obtaining a Collateral Proof off-chain from the Nomial Validator (not pictured), solver submits a transaction to the inventory access pool to fill the user’s intent

2b) User intent filled - In the same transaction, the inventory access pool sends funds to fill the user’s intent

3. Solver refunded - After some delay (~6 hrs), the solver is refunded on chain X by Everclear

4. Solver repays pool - In a subsequent transaction, the solver repays the inventory access pool with the original amount used for the fill (Step 2) plus an access fee

Validating Solver Access

The ability to use capital in inventory access pools is restricted to collateralized solvers. Collateral is deposited by solvers to a smart contract on Nomial Chain, an Ethereum L2. The Nomial Validator service is responsible for issuing access permissions to solvers based on the state of a solver’s collateral and outstanding access requests.

Nomial Validator

The Nomial Validator is an off-chain service that is responsible for issuing permissions to solvers based on the status of their collateral, access, and repayments.

The MVP validator will be a simple service with a single operator. Future versions will focus on decentralizing the mechanism for validation.

Access Fees

Fees will be parameterized in pool deployment (similar to Uniswap V2/V3 pool fee tiers). Exact fee amounts will be determined when the MVP is launched. Future versions may introduce a more complex fee market where LP’s can individually express the fees they’re willing to take

Scope

Nomial will build and deploy the following:

Smart contracts for inventory access pools. These handle deposit and withdraw functionality for LP’s A baseline solver. This solver interfaces with Everclear and utilizes inventory from the pools for fills. Other solvers can also participate. Smart contracts for a single-chain collateral pool. In order for solvers to access assets from pools, they need to deposit collateral. This collateral ensures that pools will be repaid if the solver fails to repay. An off-chain service to permit solver access. In order to prevent solvers from access more value than what they have collateralized, they will be required to obtain permission to access through an off-chain service.

Key Participants

Solvers Description: Advanced agents that fill bridging intents for users. Solvers can opt-in to using Nomial inventory access pools. As part of this project, Nomial will develop and run a baseline solver and provide support to solvers who wish to opt in to the protocol. Benefits: Rather than fronting their own capital and bearing the cost of holding, managing, and optimizing inventory, solvers get access to inventory on-demand for a small fee.

Liquidity Providers Description: Passive capital holders (such as DAO treasuries) who contribute liquidity to inventory access pools and earn fees for doing so. Providing liquidity to an inventory access pool is permissionless. Benefits: Passive capital holders can put their capital to work using permissionless pools, without having to interact with trusted service providers or solvers directly. These pools can be built on top of existing yield bearing protocols (AMM pools or lending markets).

Intent-Based Bridges Description: Protocols that facilitate end-user intents to bridge and solvers to optimize their route Benefits: Inventory Access allows intent-based bridge solvers to support a broader range of assets and chains without taking on additional risk

Clearing Layer (Everclear) Description: A protocol that reduces rebalancing costs for solvers by netting out Coincidence of Wants (CoW) transactions Benefits: All fills that use inventory access pools will be rebalanced through Everclear, which is more cost effective than having solvers rebalance every fill individually

End-users Description: Users who want to bridge assets between chains Benefits: Lower cost and risk for solvers = lower cost for end-users.

Milestones

1. Testnet Launch (January 15th): Code-complete and functional Inventory Access pool contracts, off-chain validator implementation, and solver collateral system. Demonstrate that this is running in a test environment (local dev env or on public a testnet such as Sepolia) $7,500 + 30% ($2,250) = $9,750

2. Mainnet Launch (February 28th): Deploy to production networks, run production validators and solvers. Provide a tx hash to demonstrate that this can service production intent fills for 3 chains. $7,500 + 30% ($2,250) = $9,750

3. Post-launch Incentives: For each month of operation, if solvers utilizing Nomial rebalance through Everclear consistently every 24 hours, Nomial receives an additional $1,000 per month up to 1 year ($12,000 maximum)

Plan:

There will be a whitelisted set of validators (not a single Nomial operated validator). Validators are off-chain signers responsible for granting access to liquidity and initiating collateral liquidations if solvers fail to meet repayment obligations. Delegates from Everclear DAO, a Nomial signer, and others TBD will be included in the initial validator set The long-term plan is to migrate Nomial validation to a completely trustless model using a staking/slashing mechanism. This is out of scope for the V1 We will deploy the core contracts to Arbitrum One. Arbitrum will be the primary chain for the protocol Pools will be deployed to major chains (Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Base, and others) Pools can be deployed to any Arbitrum Orbit chain (exact chains TBD) The core contracts on Arbitrum One will include a whitelist of pools and chains. A multi-sig owner will be created with delegates from Everclear, Arbitrum, Nomial, and others to approve pool deployments