Intents can now do more: Introducing Atomic Bundles

When most people think about intents in DeFi, they think about swaps. Sign an intent, let a solver find the best route, get your tokens. Clean, simple, effective. But intents were always meant to do more than that.

An intent, at its core, is a signed expression of what you want - not a specific instruction about how to get it. It means the system can optimize for the best outcome across a much broader set of possible actions than a simple token exchange. The question was always: how do you unlock that potential without forcing every protocol to build the execution infrastructure from scratch?

That's what Atomic Bundles solve.

The problem: every integration started at zero

CoW Protocol has long supported "hooks" - a mechanism that lets protocols attach additional actions to a swap. Need to deposit tokens into a lending protocol after your swap settles? A hook can do that. But hooks have limits. They're not always enforceable. And for more complex workflows - especially anything involving flashloan-based actions or sequences that need to execute around settlement rather than after it - hooks aren't enough.

The result was that protocols wanting to build genuinely sophisticated flows on CoW Protocol had to write custom wrapper contracts. Every new integration. Every new use case. Every team had to figure out the same underlying architecture independently, absorb the same engineering overhead, and coordinate the same moving parts. Some teams did it. Most didn't bother.

That's a significant barrier - and it meant a lot of powerful use cases stayed firmly on the shelf. Atomic Bundles change this calculus entirely.

The solution: a reusable baseline for advanced integrations

The new template provides a reusable, forkable baseline that any protocol can extend to build advanced intent-based workflows. It handles the execution context that complex atomic flows require "around" CoW Protocol's settlement layer - things like flashloan sequences, loop-borrow-redeposit flows, and repay-with-collateral operations - so protocol teams don't have to rebuild that infrastructure every time.

Instead of each new integration reinventing the wrapper pattern from the ground up, there's now a standard starting point. Fork it, extend it with your use-case-specific logic, and plug into CoW Protocol's solver network for execution. The hard parts are handled.

This matters for a few reasons:

• It lowers the barrier for sophisticated integrations. Protocols in lending, perpetuals, payments, and adjacent verticals can now offer their users complex atomic flows - without the months of engineering work that would previously have been required.

• It makes intents genuinely composable. An atomic bundle can combine a swap with any surrounding action, executed atomically in a single settlement. That's a meaningful expansion of what intent-based DeFi can deliver.

• It creates a shared standard. As more protocols build on the template, the ecosystem benefits from a common approach - rather than a proliferation of one-off wrapper contracts that can't learn from each other.

What does "around settlement" actually mean?

When CoW Protocol settles a batch of orders, there's a defined sequence: pre-interactions happen, tokens are transferred, post-interactions happen. Hooks let you attach actions to that sequence. But some workflows need more than that - they need to wrap the settlement itself, borrowing liquidity or setting up state before tokens move, and cleaning up after.

That's the gap Atomic Bundles fill. They give protocols a structured way to define logic that executes in that broader execution context, while still benefiting from CoW Protocol's solver competition and batch auction underneath. The swap quality doesn't degrade because you've added complexity. The solvers still compete for best execution on every embedded trade.

What this means for builders

The primary audience for Atomic Bundles is protocol teams who want to offer their users advanced DeFi workflows - without building the execution layer themselves. If you're building in any of these verticals, there's now a faster path to production:

• Lending and leverage protocols can offer one-click looping, repay-with-collateral, and collateral swap flows - strategies that users want but that have historically been too operationally complex to execute safely.

• Perpetuals protocols can build atomic open/close flows that combine swaps with position management in a single settlement.

• Payments and treasury tools can construct multi-step atomic flows that don't expose users to mid-execution risk.

In each case, the solver network underneath means that every embedded swap gets competitive execution - not just whatever route happens to be convenient when the transaction fires.

Getting started

The Atomic Bundles template is available on GitHub, alongside documentation covering the concept, when to use it, and a full integration checklist. If you're evaluating whether this is the right fit for your use case, the docs are the best starting point.

CoW DAO will also be running developer workshops and office hours on Discord in the coming weeks - a chance to get hands-on with the template and talk directly with the team. Keep an eye out for the Build-a-thon prompt too: the best wrapper-powered intent flow wins.

If you're a protocol team and want to explore a wrapper-based integration before the workshops, reach out directly. We're particularly interested in conversations with teams building in the lending, perps, and payments verticals.

Read the docs → docs.cow.fi

Fork the template → Github

Talk to the team → Discord