Request for Quote (RFQ)
Request for Quote (RFQ) is a trading mechanism where a trader requests a price quote from one or more market makers for a specific trade, rather than interacting with a shared order book or AMM. The market maker responds with a firm price at which they will execute the trade; the trader can accept or reject. RFQ systems protect traders from MEV and front-running because the quote is private (not broadcast to a mempool) and the execution is atomic against the quoted price. RFQ is widely used in institutional crypto trading and in DeFi protocols like Hashflow and 0x's RFQ system. The tradeoff is that RFQ quotes may include a wider spread than a deep CLOB because the market maker must price in inventory risk and information asymmetry. Hybrid aggregators like 1inch combine RFQ quotes with AMM and aggregator routes, choosing the execution path that delivers the best net price for each trade.