CLOB feature request: server-enforced order time-to-book / late-cancel

[jacobianvertex]

Summary

Feature request for CLOB to support a server-enforced order freshness constraint: reject or auto-cancel an order if it cannot reach the book within a caller-specified latency budget.

This is intended to prevent stale orders from resting or filling after the caller has already timed out the request or moved on.

Problem

On latency spikes, POST /order can take from hundreds of milliseconds to many seconds to ACK. During that in-flight window:

• The client may not yet have the order ID returned by the create response.
• Client-side HTTP timeouts only abandon the local request; they do not guarantee the order will stop server-side.
• cancel-all and market-level cancel flows may not catch an order that has not reached the book yet.
• If the order is later accepted, it can rest or fill at a stale price, creating adverse or "zombie" fills.

This is most painful on fast, short-duration markets where the market can move materially inside one slow ACK window.

Requested CLOB behavior

Evaluate a first-class CLOB/API primitive for one or more of the following:

1. Server-side time-to-book / max-staleness: reject an order if it cannot book within N ms of signing or receipt.
2. Server-side late-cancel: auto-cancel a create request that exceeds a caller-specified deadline before ACK/book.
3. Short TTL / sub-60s expiry semantics where safe, so stale orders cannot rest after arrival.
4. Deterministic order-id cancellation semantics that reliably tombstone an in-flight order before it can book.

Scope note

This should be evaluated as a CLOB/API execution constraint, not an SDK-only timeout option. Once the CLOB primitive exists, SDKs can expose it cleanly as an order submission option.

GitHub context

• Polymarket/ts-sdk#98 — current SDK-facing feature request
• Polymarket/clob-client#244 — original request in the older archived CLOB client repo

Related reports

• Polymarket/py-clob-client#273 — client timeout but order matched/filled
• Polymarket/py-clob-client#287 — post-match balance/allowance cache after instant matched fills
• Polymarket/py-clob-client-v2#34 — post-V2 ghost fills
• Polymarket/rs-clob-client-v2#30 — empty-string order id leaves orders un-cancelable

Environment

Affects CLOB clients and direct REST integrations. Reported against v2 CLOB after the 2026-04-28 cutover.

[cesarenaldi]

Thanks for opening this and for staying persistent on it.

I agree with the problem statement: a client-side timeout does not solve cases where the order can still be accepted or filled server-side after the caller has moved on.

This makes sense as a CLOB/API execution constraint, not an SDK-only change. I’m going to forward this to the CLOB team so it can be evaluated in the wider CLOB strategy.