The quote book
Signed, short-lived standing quotes refreshed every couple of seconds. A quote is a commitment, not an indication.
Providers do not wait to be asked. They continuously stream standing quotes to the router: cryptographically signed price commitments per model class, carrying a price per million input tokens, a price per million output tokens, a capacity limit, and an expiry. This is market-maker mechanics applied to inference. A provider manages its quote the way a trading firm manages inventory, repricing as conditions change.
The same signature can carry optional Context Passport cache/delta capabilities and explicit speculative-cancellation consent. These are non-launch experimental commitments: the router uses only capabilities present in the live signed quote and only while the corresponding runtime gate is enabled. They are dark for the V1 mainnet launch.
Three properties make the book work as a market rather than a cache of price lists:
- Short-lived. Quotes carry a TTL of 5 to 30 seconds and are refreshed roughly every 2 seconds. A quote also needs at least 2.5 seconds of TTL runway to enter an auction, because the award, 402, verify, and dispatch pipeline spends real time: a quote that can win but not honor is worse than no quote.
- Capacity-aware. Each quote states how many requests the provider can absorb, and the auction filters out quotes whose provider is already at its in-flight limit. Prices track GPU utilization: the example quoter reprices off the vLLM metrics endpoint automatically.
- Verified on ingest. Every quote is checked against the provider's allowlisted key before it enters the book, and logged append-only. A quote is therefore non-repudiable: in a dispute, the provider signed exactly those prices for exactly that window.
A quote is a commitment
In OTC markets, "last look" is the practice of quoting a price and then declining the trade when it arrives. Omnious treats a standing quote as firm: rejecting a routed request that matches your own live quote is a recorded fault, evidenced by the signed quote plus the rejected request. In Beta, measured completion reliability and operator enforcement can reduce or remove traffic. There is no live collateral stake or on-chain slashing path.
Firmness is what lets the auction quote the customer a real price before payment or prepaid credit reservation. The 402 response prices the request at the winner's cleared rates, and the winner cannot renege when the paid request lands seconds later.
Live RFQ for the long tail
Standing quotes serve the hot path, roughly 95% of traffic, with no added round trip. For specialist requests standing quotes cannot serve, such as very large contexts, exotic models, or fine-tuned checkpoints, a Proposed design adds a second mode: the router broadcasts a request for quotes to eligible providers with a short sealed response window of 150 to 500 ms, sized to the customer's latency tolerance. Providers answer with one-shot bids, and the best score wins. Live-request RFQ mode is Proposed; the signed standing-quote book is the Beta hot path.
examples/provider-quoter.ts next to your inference server: it posts a signed quote every 2 seconds from your price floors, and reprices along the utilization curve when pointed at your vLLM metrics. Your floors are your business; the mechanism finds your margin.- router/src/market/quotes.ts signature verify, TTL and runway, capacity, the in-memory book
- router/examples/provider-quoter.ts the quoting loop a provider actually runs