Pod Integration (Shdow Mode) #4126
Description
Background
We want to explore further decentralizing the auction arbitration using the pod network. At the moment the autopilot is a single centralized entity that all drivers report their solutions to. When the auction deadline is over the autopilot picks a set of winners according to the rules of combinatorial auctions and sends /settle requests to the winning drivers.
With pod the idea would be that drivers are posting their bids to the pod network. After the deadline is over every driver would fetch all the bids with enough attestations from the pod network and run the same combinatorial auction logic to figure out on their own if they won or not and if they won they go ahead and submit their solutions.
For this logic to work (i.e. autopilot picks the same winner as individual drivers) all participating drivers need to submit their bids to pod.
In order to reduce risks from such a big change it will happen in phases where the first phase simply uses pod in a shadow mode. That means the auction arbitration logic will work as before but additionally the driver will submit its bids to pod, later collect all bids from pod, run the combinatorial winner selection, and finally LOG the outcome.
Only once this ran in staging for a while with satisfying results will we move to the next phase.
The pod team already opened a PR with the suggested changes for the shadow mode.
This PR captures the scope of:
- rebasing the PR and polishing it
- enabling the shadow mode in staging
- monitoring the results and tweaking the implementation until we are confident enough for the next step