CoW Swap’s 2nd birthday celebration!

On April 28th, 2021, CoW Swap was publicly announced and deployed to Ethereum mainnet as a proof of concept to showcase the power behind its underlying mechanism, CoW Protocol.

CowSwap is live!
👉 https://t.co/16jaKW2324

Check out how CoWs protect your trades from #MEV and save 90% of gas costs on your trades👇 pic.twitter.com/FK9NBlLLUn

— CoW DAO | CoW Swap & MEV Blocker (@CoWSwap) April 28, 2021

One year later, we made this post:

🐮🎉 Today is CowSwap's birthday & we would love to celebrate with you!!🐮🎉

If you trade on CowSwap today, you'll be able to find a special birthday gift!#CoWGMI

For this amazing year, we put together a nice summary of key moments & stats achieved:https://t.co/f3RuLdS3Bi

— CoW DAO | CoW Swap & MEV Blocker (@CoWSwap) April 28, 2022

For many people, this was the first time they heard of the project. Little did they know that with just one swap, it would become their favorite #DEX across Ethereum & Gnosis Chain. CowSwap’s main goal has always been to protect users from MEV attacks (frontrunning, sandwiching and more) through the use of a batch auction settlement layer. Here’s a summary of everything CoW Swap has launched and accomplished so far:

• April 28th, 2021 → CowSwap is born and rolls out in production, v.1.0
• August 13th, 2021 → CowSwap moves out of Alpha (Proof of Concept) and launches its upgraded smart contract to tightly integrate with Balancer v2. Composability is the key to Balancer CoW Protocol, where Balancer routes trades directly to CoW Protocol, and CoW Protocol settles trades in Balancer pools more efficiently.
• February 4th, 2022 → vCOW tokens land on CowSwap, later followed by COW tokens.
• February 11th, 2022 → CoW DAO is born!
• February 17th, 2022 → The CoW Investors Guild launches with an astonishing NFT.
• **March 7th, 2022 →**The First proposal is passed by vCOW token holders, CoW DAO’s participation agreement.
• March 29th, 2022 → CoWDAO closes a $23M private & CoWmunity investment round. The investment round contains 57 participants from the private round (VCs, Angel Investors, etc) & > 5000 CoWmunity participants.
• April 22nd, 2022 → CoW-organizes the first mev.day in for Devconnect Amsterdam.
• April 28th, 2022 → CoW Swap´s 1st birthday.
• June 8th, 2022 → The CoW Grants program goes live.
• July 14th, 2022 → CoW Protocols Monthly recaps are born. Subsequently, each month’s news, developments, governance discussions and more are compiled into a newsletter-style article.
• September 29th, 2022 → CoW Swap´s Token page goes live, users can now mark their favorite tokens and approve them whenever they find convenient, regardless of the actual trading timing.
• October 12th, 2022 → CoW Protocol team takes over DEVCON VI in Bogota with 4 different talks!!
• October 28th, 2022 → Data analysis on how much slippage DEX Aggregator users suffer. Do CoWs experience less slippage? Indeed they do :)
• November 2nd, 2022 → CoW Protocol launches support for ERC-1271 signatures. ERC-1271 makes it possible to trade “gas-less-ly” on CoW Protocol with any Smart Contract or Smart Contract wallet.
• November 7th, 2022 → A new AMM concept is introduced. CoW Native AMMs (aka Surplus Capturing AMMs with single price clearing) protect their LPs from MEV, get less LVR and provide lower fees to traders.
• November 16th, 2022 → CoW Protocol proudly announces the launch of Seasolver from @iearnfinance, the leading yield aggregator on Ethereum. This is one of the most novel applications of a solver to date — enabling direct trading of LP positions.
• November 22nd, 2022 → A partnership with @ChainPatrol to help identify scammers is launched alongside security portal for users to easily report those F****rs
• November 22nd, 2022 → Swapr integrates CoW Protocol into its Eco Router.
• December 6th, 2022 → Shapeshift integrates CoW Protocol and routes all orders in Ethereum to the CoWs!!
• December 8th, 2022 → Significant updates to the CoW Swap UI go live through a new brand refresh :)
• December 12th, 2022 → The most UN-limited limit orders in DeFi launch. Limit orders from CoW Protocol officially go live
• December 19th, 2022 → A new contract that allows users to trade directly with ETH or xDAI without having to wrap first launches.
• January 6th, 2023 → A Smart Order tutorial for users to easily create any sort of financial product through EIP1271 orders launches.
• January 25th, 2023 → CoW DAO holders approve the hiring of a treasury manager, and retain Karpatkey as the provider for the service..
• February 8th, 2023 → ENS sells $16m worth of ETH (10K) through smart orders without suffering from any MEV, despite revealing their trade intent a week in advance through a DAO vote. A first for DeFi!
• February 24th, 2023 → With the help of Wherever, CoW Swap launches wallet to wallet notifications, so that users can stay up to date on the latest news.
• March 8th, 2023 → First implementation of TWAP orders goes live thanks to the CoW Grants program.
• March 30th, 2023 → CoW Swap launches a new traffic light system to help you understand how close your limit order price is to executing.
• April 5th, 2023 → CoW Swap, in collaboration with @beaverbuild and Agnostic Relayer, proudly announces MEV Blocker https://MEVBlocker.io. MEV Blocker is a free RPC endpoint that pays users to protect themselves from MEV across a wide variety of use cases in DeFi, NFTs, and dApps.
• April 17th, 2023 → Partially fillable limit orders launch. Enabled by default, partial fills bring faster trade settlement to limit orders.
• April 19th, 2023 → An API with Zeromev launches that allows users to understand and quantify how much they have lost to MEV. This initiative was funded via the CoW Grants program.

It’s been our honor to share these last two years with the incredible CoWmmunity! Below we’ve included some notable statistics from this period that are worth highlighting.

Main Protocol Statistics

Total Volume: $23.39 Billion

Total # of Trades: 595,373

Total # of Users:

Total number of distinct tokens traded: 3,640 tokens

Total number of batches settled: 449K

Top 25 traded tokens:

Number of currently active solvers:

User Benefits

Due to the delegated trading model of CoW Swap, users have been able to save a cumulative total of 7K ETH, which is worth $19.5M at current prices!!!

But the savings don’t stop there — not by a long shot… CoW Swap has provided its users with an astonishing $119 million in trade surplus. This is $119 million more than they originally signed up for when submitting their trades!

Top 3 Batch highlights

Batch with the largest volume

5 different traders selling and buying DAI — USDC, USDC — ICHI, NOTE — DAI, USDC — wNXM and MIM — RDN who all together accounted for a total batch volume of $90,698,916.42, which is an impressive figure!

Batch with the largest amount of traders

34 different traders selling and buying ETH — GNO — perfectly batched together to hit the AMM with the best price only once, thus making the 34 trades much more gas cost efficient.

Most beautiful CoW

6 different traders selling and buying USDT — USDT, perfectly matched >$1m against each other with >99% CoW volume (coincidence of wants/ internal matching) generating nice surplus for all

Batch with highest surplus

A single trader selling and buying USDC — USDT received a surplus of 4% thanks to CoW Protocol’s batch auction settlement mechanism. In their trade, this translated to around $ 400K

Conclusion

We can’t believe you are growing so fast! It seems like it was just yesterday that you came into this world. CoW Swap was born with the goal of becoming the most MEV-resistant DEX. It is the only DEX designed to give you total peace of mind, reducing MEV value extraction as much as possible for you and batching your trades to save you gas and AMM fees. So what are you waiting for? Go trade on swap.cow.fi and help the protocol scale its benefits!

More trades → More CoWs → More protection from MEV → Better prices

May the years ahead continue to amaze everyone with the power of CoWs!!