6 ♣ · Coordination · Draft
Batched Auction
Bids are collected over a window, then all settled at once at one shared clearing price.
How it works
Instead of matching each bid as it arrives, the system opens a window and collects every bid. Nobody sees who wins while the window is open. When it closes, all bids are sorted and a single clearing price is found where supply meets demand. Every winning bid pays that same price, whatever it offered. Bids below the price are rejected, and the batch executes in one step. Because order within the window does not matter, racing to be first gains nothing.
Use it when
- You sell tokens or allocate a fixed budget and want one fair price for everyone.
- Stop bots from front-running members by removing the advantage of speed.
- Settle many requests in one transaction to save gas and time.
Watch out for
- Bidders must wait for the window to close, so it is slow for anyone who needs instant execution.
- Thin batches with few bids can clear at a strange price set by one large bidder.
Example
CoW Protocol. CoW Protocol has settled trades in batch auctions since 2021, collecting orders for a short window and clearing all of them at one uniform price per token pair.