CoW DAO: 2025 in Review!
See you later 2025! But before we wave goodbye to this year, let’s review all the amazing things that went on in and around CoW DAO over the last 12 months.
Ready?
Let’s go.
CoW DAO broke new ground for volume, users, and market share
This year was big for CoW DAO, in all the ways. CoW Protocol, which powers CoW Swap, saw $87 billion in trading volume in 2025, our biggest year ever. For comparison, in 2024, CoW Protocol processed $40.2 billion. CoW Protocol more than doubled its volume in 12 months. But things didn’t stop there.
We broke previous records for users (both new and returning), and maintained consistently high user retention rates. Over the course of 2025, thanks in part to our record-breaking expansion to new chains (more on that below) CoW Protocol’s market share across all its networks remained in the top 3 DEX aggregators across all of DeFi.
Helping CoW Swap, and the underlying CoW Protocol achieve this feat was the tireless work CoW DAO’s engineering team did to help cope with the marked increase in users, volume, and chains that we operate on.
But this was just the beginning. Below we delve into what else CoW DAO got up to in 2025.
CoW Swap headed to new new chains
This year was a big one for CoW Swap and new launches. In June, we launched CoW Swap on Avalanche, the lightning Layer 1 blockchain with sub-second finality, low fees, and support for custom appchains via Subnets.
A few weeks later, we brought our full suite of products - CoW Swap, CoW Protocol, and soon, CoW AMM - to Polygon. That meant gasless, MEV-protected trading for one of the fastest-growing L2 ecosystems in DeFi.
In September we launched on Lens Chain, bringing our class leading MEV protection to the chain that’s redefining ownership and community in Web3.
The following month, we rolled out CoW Swap to BNB Chain, becoming the smoothest way to trade on one of the fastest-growing ecosystems in crypto.
Last but certainly not least, in December CoW Swap went live on Linea. Traders can now swap and send tokens without worrying about gas - while benefiting from better prices, advanced order types, and full MEV protection.
Never before has Cow Swap been on more chains, with plenty more to come in 2026.
CoW Product Launches and Tweaks
2025 was a year where CoW DAO quietly shipped infrastructure upgrades that solved real, annoying DeFi problems.
Cross-chain swaps collapsed the old bridge-then-swap circus into a single, gasless flow - meaning users could now move value across chains without juggling apps, approvals, or price risk mid-hop. This was a foundational shift for how cross-chain trading should work.
Fair Combinatorial Batch Auctions pushed the protocol further into truly fair execution, allowing multiple assets and conditions to be matched atomically by solvers. This helped reduce MEV, improve price discovery, and make complex trades safer and more capital-efficient for everyone. .
Partial approvals. We fixed one of DeFi's most broken UX patterns: letting users approve only what's needed to successfully trade. This small but significant change helps keep users’ funds safer instead of blindly trusting contracts forever.
And auto-slippage quietly removed another DeFi stumbling block: instead of users guessing slippage tolerances (and getting sandwiched for it), the system now sets them dynamically based on market conditions. What does that mean? Fewer failed trades, less MEV leakage, and no more "why did my swap revert?" moments.
Put together, these weren't flashy features - they were structural upgrades that made DeFi trading safer, simpler, and harder to exploit. Exactly the kind of progress that compounds.
Partnerships & Integrations
Alongside shipping core infrastructure, CoW DAO spent the year embedding itself deeper into the DeFi stack through partnerships that weren't about logos, but leverage. The collaboration with Aave brought solver-powered, MEV-protected swaps directly into lending workflows - enabling things like collateral swaps and debt rebalancing without users exiting Aave's ecosystem, a meaningful step toward intent-based DeFi primitives living inside major protocols.
The integration with NEAR Protocol via NEAR Intents connected two intent-based systems, showing how cross-chain execution can become composable infrastructure rather than fragile glue code. In practice, that allowed CoW Protocol’s solvers to find the best prices, while NEAR Protocol found the best bridge. Joining WalletConnect's Certified App program signalled a commitment to safety, standards, and UX maturity - crucial as DeFi reaches less technical users.
Integrations with Ondo Finance, Morpho, and Gnosis expanded CoW Swap's reach into RWAs, next-gen lending, and DAO-native trading environments, embedding protected execution where capital actually lives.
Visibility and credibility grew through integrations with DeFiLlama, Infinex, and emerging coordination layers like Palmera DAO and Moxie DAO, while experiments with distribution and automation - from Bankr to creator-led education via Milk Road - pushed CoW execution into new surfaces. Taken together, these weren't vanity partnerships. They were about making solver-based, MEV-aware trading the default plumbing across DeFi - quietly rewiring how users move, manage, and protect capital at scale.
New Listings
This year also marked a decisive push from protocol to distribution, as CoW DAO execution went live across major exchanges, trading interfaces, and new onramps to users. Listing on Kraken Pro put solver-powered, MEV-protected trading in front of one of the most sophisticated centralized-exchange audiences - a quiet but important bridge between CeFi liquidity and DeFi-native execution.
Integrations with Korean heavyweights Upbit and Bithumb expanded reach into one of the most active retail trading regions globally, while listings and launches with AscendEX extended access across global spot markets.
On the DeFi-native side, we refreshed limit orders and rolled out a new delegate program that strengthened power-user tooling and governance participation, while integrations with interfaces like ShapeShift, Infinex, and Arcana embedded CoW execution directly where users already trade.
Improved visibility through DeFiLlama ensured the work we’ve done as a community was visible to the wider ecosystem. The result wasn't just more venues - it was solver-based execution escaping the "DEX tab" and becoming underlying plumbing across exchanges, wallets, and interfaces. Less migration, less friction, more protection. Distribution, finally done right.
Reflecting on our Udderly amazing Journey, and cheers to a CoW-tastic 2026!
This year has been another blockbuster for CoW DAO. We’re already diving headfirst into 2026 with a renewed commitment to more products built for both novice and experienced users.
Here’s to another thrilling year at the forefront of DeFi!
Mooooo
