What is Bench
Bench is the NBBO (National Best Bid and Offer) for autonomous agent trading — a multi-source best-execution oracle that proves your agent got the best price.
The Problem
Autonomous trading agents are making millions of swap decisions daily across DeFi. But there's a fundamental trust problem: how do you know your agent got the best price?
Today, most agents query a single DEX aggregator — 1inch, Paraswap, or whatever the developer chose. The user has no way to verify whether that was the best available price or whether the agent could have done better elsewhere.
The single-source problem: If your agent only checks one aggregator, you're trusting that one source to give the best price. Aggregator prices can vary by 0.1% to 3%+ depending on the pair, chain, and liquidity. On a $100k swap, that's $100 to $3,000 in potential slippage — invisible and unverifiable.
The NBBO Analogy
In traditional finance, the NBBO (National Best Bid and Offer) is a regulation that requires brokers to execute trades at the best available price across all exchanges. It exists because no single exchange has the best price all the time.
DeFi has no such protection. Bench fills that gap for autonomous agents by:
- Querying 13 DEX aggregators simultaneously to discover the true best price
- Computing a consensus score that measures how much sources agree
- Issuing a cryptographic certificate (BEC v2) that anyone can verify
- Anchoring certificates on-chain for permanent, tamper-proof records
Key Benefits
Best-Execution Proof
Every swap comes with a cryptographic certificate proving the agent found the best price across 13 sources. Not a promise — a proof.
Source-Agnostic
Bench is not an aggregator. It queries all the aggregators and tells you which one has the best price. No vendor lock-in, no conflicts of interest.
Independent Verification
Anyone can verify a Bench certificate using the open-source @usebench/verifier package. No trust required — just math.
On-Chain Anchoring
Certificates are anchored to BenchRegistry on X Layer. Permanent, tamper-proof, queryable on-chain.
Agent Reputation
Bench tracks agent performance over time — certified rate, average agreement, sources used. Build reputation through verifiable behavior.
Sub-3-Second Latency
All 13 sources are queried in parallel. Consensus computed, certificate signed, and returned — typically in under 3 seconds.
What Bench Is Not
- Not a DEX aggregator— Bench does not execute trades. It certifies prices.
- Not a price oracle— Unlike Chainlink or Pyth, Bench provides swap-specific quotes, not general price feeds.
- Not a trading bot— Bench is infrastructure that trading bots use to prove best execution.