CoW Protocol August 2023 Highlights

TL;DR

• During the month of August, CoW Protocol handled a total volume of $1.05B, and generated a surplus of $5.3M
• In exciting news, CoW Protocol launched TWAP orders, added native support for Trezor wallets, and was featured on the 0xResearch podcast
• In terms of Governance, CoW DAO executed CIPS 28, 29, and 30

Protocol Stats

This month, CoW Protocol settled a total of $1.05B.

This month, the top 3 batches worth highlighting are the following:

• Batch with the highest % of CoW trades (Transaction details). The total batch volume was $41,401, and it was created by two traders who were CoWed for 40% ($16,401) of the batch volume. One trader was buying stETH with DAI, and the other trader was selling DAI for stETH.

• Batch containing the highest volume (Transaction details): The total batch volume was $9,988,935.71 and it was created by a single trader who was swapping USDT to USDC.

• Batch with the highest amount of surplus (Transaction details): The total batch volume was 3,545.97 ETH and it was created by two traders who were swapping ETH to stETH and ETH to DAI. Combined, these two traders achieved the largest surplus for the month of August, by getting $127,719.33K (2.01% surplus) extra.

During the month of August, the top 10 traders traded a total of $109M.

In the table below you can see the trade volume that CoW Swap traders have executed as well as the total volume for all trades. Our most active trader executed a whopping $100M in trades with CoW Protocol this month.

Solvers

In August, solvers generated a total of $5.2M, which is money in the pockets of traders.

Below you can find a breakdown of how each solver performed in August.

Governance

It has been a hectic month in terms of governance; CoW DAO has executed 3 proposals! After a relaxing month of July, the CoWs came back in force for August 💪.

Executed Proposals

This month we executed three important proposals:

• CIP 28 — Should CoW DAO send its profits to the CoW Treasury Core unit to generate extra revenues?
• CIP-29: Renewal of the solver rewards program
• CIP-30: Implementing oSnap for Optimistic Governance in CoW DAO

Draft Proposals

There has been a new proposal asking for feedback before moving into the next phase, a final CIP, in its current form:

• Fees and CoW bonding for MEVBlocker

Technical Discussions

As an “agora” for technical topics on batch auctions or CoW Protocol-related topics, the forum surfaced an interesting post:

1. Measuring and banning overbidding

Make sure to read through it and leave comments — your feedback is highly appreciated and will help move important topics forward. If you are interested in submitting a proposal to the CoW DAO, make sure to use the following template.

CoWmunity News

• In August we launched the much anticipated TWAP (Time-Weighted Average Price) special order type on Ethereum Mainnet and Gnosis Chain
• Added native support for Trezor — Trezor users can now interact with CoW Swap natively without having to connect via a third party wallet
• CoW Swap’s co-founder and CTO, Felix, was a guest on the 0xResearch podcast where he discussed strategies for eliminating MEV
• Participated in a Twitter space on “Intent-ifying the future” with Across Protocol
• MEV Blocker was featured in the Our Network newsletter as a solution to the problem of MEV
• CoW DAO’s treasury manager, Karpatkey, built out a slick dashboard showcasing the treasury operations of CoW DAO
• Keystone wallet partnered with CoW Swap to give customers 15% off its new CoW-branded Keystone 3 Pro
• Coinshift integrated CoW Swap to bring CoW’s multi-sig swap functionality to Coinshift apps
• A grant proposal for a Software Engineer Core Contributor was posted to the forum and passed in voting on Snapshot
• A grant proposal for a Copywriter Core Contributor was posted to the forum and passed in voting on Snapshot
• Published several articles on our blog: What is price improvement and why is it unique to CoW Swap?, Aave Trade Breakdown, ENS Trade Breakdown, Nexus Mutual Trade Breakdown, CoW Swap Launches TWAP Orders, How to use CoW Swap’s TWAP orders via Safe Wallet, and All you need to know about CoW Swap’s new Safe fallback handler

Product Updates

Backend

The backend team has been working hard to improve the product infrastructure. In August, we:

• Worked on storing more required data in colocated mode
• Implemented a new strategy for fetching the current block to reduce system lag by 1 block
• Made a strong push towards verified quotes and CIP-27
• Implemented a change so that solvers are no longer allowed to give strange values from the score (specifically overbidding), the driver will now always calculate the score
• Improved driver colocation by deploying Goerli as expected and refactoring how we setup legacy estimators in the infrastructure
• Launched TWAP
• Implemented a metrics fix for determining which solver provides the “winning” quote
• Removed a bunch of code related to surplus fee computation

Frontend

The frontend team has been pushing hard for several improvements in the UI front as well as the overall UI infrastructure. In August, we:

• Released CowSwap 1.44.0
• Worked on integration of hardware wallets (Trezor, Ledger)
• Added support for permitable tokens (EIP-2612)
• Made lots of progress on TWAP and released the feature
• Added support for WalletConnect v2
• Did lots of work on the WatchTower — an important piece of infrastructure for TWAP and Composable orders
• Exposed the interface to composable orders via cow-sdk

Open Job Positions

The CoW Protocol team is currently looking to hire:

Engineering

Backend Engineer with RustRemote or Lisbon

For more information on our latest job openings, visit: https://cow.fi/careers