gossip (read) priority fees on hyperliquid are broken
currently the team that is benefitting the most is wintermute (insert fist shaking red emoji guy meme)
this is not publicly known but can be determined with certainty by mapping out transfers to labeled wallets from the top winner of the gossip priority fee auctions (they have won 79% of the slot 0 auctions in the past 24h)
tldr; wahhh wahhhh wahhh hl gossip priority, not fair. add more slots or scrap the gossip auction
my proposed solution:
1) increase gossip priority to 20 equal-priority slots
2) make it so winning an auction slot grants IP whitelisting to a foundation-run peering slot
i think this basically solves it and would likely *increase* total gossip priority fees
---
some context
the purported intention, as stated in the docs, is to "reduce the need for market makers to hyper-optimize their infrastructure to remain competitive"
if you win the gossip auction slot, you get order book / node data 50ms (!!) faster than anyone else.
yes. one IP, across the *entire network*, gets the feeds 50ms faster. it's the whole ballgame
so in theory you could just buy the faster data slot instead of spending 10s of thousands monthly on high octane ec2 instances and [insert hft magic]
or you can do BOTH, which is what wintermute is doing
so despite the stated intentions it does the exact opposite and gives 1 wallet a dominant advantage over every other participant
further reducing the democratization of this mechanism is the fact that, practically speaking, you can only use a won gossip slot if you have a direct peering relationship with the foundation node.
multiple providers we work with couldn’t pass gossip priority benefits through to us without slowing their other peers (all independently confirmed this behavior - strange design)
and to get a foundation peering you to do 0.5% of the 14d HL maker volume (we don't quite meet this threshold so our application was rejected) as well as stake 10,000 HYPE ($780,000 here), or be like, a node service provider
---
without revealing too much i can say with 100% certainty that wintermute has maxed out BOTH the infrastructure optimization + expenditure AND is monopolizing the gossip fee auction
they're spending on average $26,000 *per day* ($10M/yr) to win this auction
so rn they're just eating everyone else's lunch
and the only way that approach is economic is if you are MM at the scale that they are, which only a handful of wallets are doing
