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The price-term hierarchy

Every price Bolt produces passes through four distinct stages. Each names a specific output; they are not interchangeable.
1

Composite mid

The price’s starting point. A depth-weighted mid-price built across multiple trading venues, with staleness filtering and outlier rejection. It represents raw cross-venue fair value before any smoothing.
2

Fair mid

The composite mid after Bolt’s Adaptive Velocity Oracle (AVO) smoothing. Noise is filtered while preserving meaningful market movement, producing a stable fair price for downstream quoting.
3

Convergence price

The fair mid with a small, gated forecasting lead when short-horizon signal is strong enough. It represents Bolt’s estimate of the near-future fair price that lagging venues are expected to converge toward. When no meaningful signal exists, it simply follows the composite.
4

Executable quote

The convergence price published onchain as a clamped bid and ask. Each quote is bounded to a maximum deviation from the composite, ensuring execution quality remains tight, verifiable, and safe for settlement. This is the price real trades execute against.

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Architecture components

Convergence Engine

Bolt’s pricing component. Builds the composite, smooths it through AVO, and forecasts the near-term path. Outputs a single executable convergence price rather than a lagging report of past trades.The pipeline’s “quoting engine” step is the Convergence Engine’s pricing function, not a separate component.
The settlement component. The onchain rail that flow settles against at the convergence price. The price is decided upstream by the Convergence Engine; the Execution Rail executes but does not quote.
Bolt’s compounding flywheel. More flow produces sharper forecasts, which produce tighter spreads, which attract more routed volume, which generates more convergence data, which produces sharper forecasts. The loop compounds with coverage.
Bolt’s proprietary in-house oracle component within the Convergence Engine. Adapts how quickly the composite is followed and produces a stable fair mid.

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Price and market terms

Synchronization layer

The shared pricing infrastructure that keeps an asset’s price synchronized across venues and chains by forecasting one executable convergence price and settling flow against it.
The depth-weighted multi-venue mid-price. Current fair value before AVO smoothing. Built with staleness filtering and outlier rejection so no single venue failure can corrupt the read.
The AVO-smoothed composite. The stable posting mid that the bid/ask are built around, after noise is filtered but before any forecasting lead is applied.
The near-future fair price Bolt may lean toward when short-horizon signal is strong enough. Falls back to the composite when it is not. This is the price the Convergence Engine forecasts lagging venues will converge toward.
The clamped onchain bid/ask published for settlement. Each tick is bounded to a maximum deviation from the composite, keeping the onchain price tight and verifiable.
The proprietary record of every cross-venue divergence accumulated over time: which venue lagged, by how much, and how fast it closed.
Daily volume divided by the capital required to quote it. The efficiency signature. Bolt’s architecture decouples execution quality from pool depth, so a smaller capital commitment produces outsized volume: one dollar recycled many times a day.
The process of determining an asset’s fair value from market activity. In traditional AMMs, price discovery and settlement happen inside the same pool. Bolt separates the two: the Convergence Engine discovers the price, while the Execution Rail settles trades against it.
The process of completing a trade by transferring assets between participants. In Bolt, settlement occurs onchain through the Execution Rail against the executable convergence price. Settlement follows pricing; it does not determine it.

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Market structure terms

Adverse selection

The loss liquidity providers take when informed traders execute against stale quotes. In traditional AMMs, the pool quotes a lagging price and informed flow picks it off. Bolt reduces adverse selection by setting the price upstream from real-time cross-venue data, so the quote is already current when flow arrives.
A measure of the cost liquidity providers bear due to stale pricing. LVR quantifies the value extracted by arbitrageurs from pools that quote outdated prices. Bolt’s architecture addresses LVR by keeping pool pricing synchronized with the broader market.
A proprietary automated market maker: a single-venue pool priced by offchain oracles. Prop-AMMs reprice within one pool but cannot synchronize across venues.
A trading model where market makers quote offchain and settle onchain. Pricing is signed for a single fill, not synchronized across the market.
In traditional finance, a real-time feed of every trade and quote across all exchanges, mandated by regulation (1976). Crypto has no equivalent. The absence of a consolidated tape is a root cause of the fragmentation Bolt solves.
The highest bid and lowest ask across all exchanges in traditional equity markets, mandated by Reg NMS (2005). Crypto has no NBBO. Bolt’s convergence price is the closest onchain analogue: a cross-venue executable price that aggregators and protocols can build on.

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Abbreviations

How Bolt Works

The four-step pipeline from market data to onchain settlement.

FAQ

Common questions about Bolt and the synchronization layer.