Proposal: Instant Swaps

Some UIs want to give their users a hyper-fast or "instant" swapping experience, like a "web 2" experience. Due to limitations of consensus, finality, and block times, this has historically been out of reach. Additionally, delayed outbound can also be a hindrance.

To give these UIs that UX for their users, they can run an active thornode and put their bond up as collateral and associate their node with their thorname (affiliate). Any swap using that thorname as an affiliate can then get 0-conf swaps. In addition, the node bond is added to the swapper clout score calculation, allowing their outbounds to skip the outbound delay. This does not mean that all swaps skip the outbound delay, as it is capped by the swapper clout score which is spent on scheduling the outbound, and recovered once the outbound is confirmed to be sent. Since affiliates can be placed by anyone, a thorname can specify a min bps to be applied to the swap for this feature to be applied (both for 0-confs and swapper clout).

If there is a double spend, reorg, or their affiliate is used in an exploit, that node bond is held liable instead of the other nodes. This ensures the UI/node wears the risk instead of the protocol.

As a note, bifrost doesn't scan the mempool for all chains (ie evm-based chains). So 0-confs wouldn't be available for those chains. Although, they tend to have fast block times and finality so this feature would be less valuable to those chains anyways. But these chains could be revisited and potentially add mempool scanning if desired.