Keeper Incentives

Keepers keep the Velocity network healthy.

Velocity has no fuel (points/incentives) program — Drift’s fuel-based keeper/user rewards were removed entirely. The only keeper incentives on Velocity are the on-chain fee/reward mechanics described below.

Keeper Rewards

For matching orders, Keepers receive a portion of the taker fee as a filler reward — see Filler Reward.

For cancelling orders (that can be cancelled, see Advanced Orders FAQ), Keepers will receive the cancel_order_fee on the state.

Liquidation rewards for keepers are set per-market (liquidator_fee) and read directly from each market’s on-chain account — check PerpMarketAccount.liquidatorFee / SpotMarketAccount.liquidatorFee for current values.

Currently, the USDC reward function for keepers (f_keeper) is designed as:

$f_{\text{keeper}} = \textit{min}(0.01 \ast \textit{max}\left(1, t_{\text{order}}\right)^ {1/4}, 0.1 \ast f_{\text{user}})$

where: $t_{\text{order}}$ is seconds since the order was placed $f_{\text{user}}$ is the taker fee paid by the user who placed the order

This is the lesser of a size-based reward (10% of the fee) and a time-based reward that grows with the fourth root of slots elapsed since the order was placed — see calculate_filler_reward (math/fees.rs) for the on-chain calculation.

A Keeper reward multiplier (for taker price improvement) is applied to the keeper’s minimum time-based reward component in the function above. Any percent improvement versus the baseline oracle +/- 10bps, increases this multiplier.

30d fill volume for keepers is tracked on-chain via UserStats, allowing for logic to reward consistent keepers with a larger multiplier on rewards.