Sep 22, 2022
CoW Protocol August 2022 Highlights
Welcome back to another CoW Update, where we break down the most notable developments of the last calendar month at CoW Protocol.
TL;DR
- In August, CoW Protocol handled $1.2B in trade volume, representing 11.5% of DEX aggregator market share. This number brought us above $15B settled cumulatively since the protocol launched (yay).
- Solvers were able to generate a total of $2,023,830 of MEV-protected surplus, which all traders got to enjoy in their pockets.
- Our 12th solver, Laertes, joined the competition. Welcome Laertes!
- CoW Protocol went through a brand unification exercise, making the CoWs cuter :).
- WE ARE (STILL) HIRING! Find our latest job opening, engineering, business development, product and operations (https://cow.fi/jobs ).
Protocol Stats
Over the month of August, CoW Protocol settled a total of $ $1,126,318,140.
This month, the top 3 batches to highlight are the following:
- Batch with the highest % of CoW trades (transaction details): The Batch Total volume was $ 69K, and it was created by two traders who were perfectly CoWed for 100% of their volume. One trader was buying $USDC — AURA, while the other trader was selling AURA — USDC.
- Batch with the highest Volume in it (transaction details): The Batch Total volume was $22M and it was created by three traders who were swapping USDC to DAI, USDC to FLX, and BTRFLY to ETH.
- Batch with the highest amount of surplus (transaction details): The Batch Total volume was $1.3M and it was created by a single trader who was swapping WETH to USDC. This trader achieved the largest surplus for the month of August, by getting 70K USDC (5.25% surplus).
In August, the top 10 traders traded a total of $24,863,685.
In the table below you can see the # of trades they executed as well as the total volume for all their trades. Our most active trader made a whopping 237 trades with CoW Protocol in August.
Solvers
In August, we saw one external team add a new solver to our staging environment. This solver is named Laertes and the CoW Protocol team is looking forward to seeing how it performs in the competition.
In regards to the Solver Statistics, one can find all the information in the following table. Looking at this table, we can see that on average, for the month of August Solvers were able to generate a total of $2,023,830 which all traders got to enjoy in their pockets.
Governance
It was a slow month in terms of governance. We guess everyone was enjoying the summer vacays… 🌴
Technical Discussions
As an “agora” for technical topics around CoW Protocol, very interesting posts have surfaced on the forum in August.
- A Vickrey style auction mechanism for the solver competition: This is a proposal for a new auction mechanism for the solver competition. On a high level, it looks like a Vickrey Auction, adapted to solver competition. The primary motivation is that it makes it unprofitable for solvers to engage in the type of strategic behavior discussed in this thread. A secondary motivation is that it allows rewards to be determined by the market based on how risky and difficult it is to find good solutions for a batch. This means the tokens paid by the DAO to incentivize solver development will more efficiently spent.
- “Pennying” as a strategy to win more auctions, and how to deal with it: During the last few weeks, it has been observed that, in order to win the competition, multiple solvers are increasing their chance of winning an auction by “buying” additional surplus for the users using a technique we call pennying.
Some of these have already executed as CIPs, but be sure to catch up on the lively discussions and participate in the forum, as your feedback will help us move forward on important topics.
CoWmunity News
- We made few small updates to how CoW Swap shows up in the world — in the spirit of unifying and reducing confusion between CoW properties. Find the full explanation here.
- @fleupold participated in 0x “Let’s talk MEV roundtable”. You can find the recording here.
- CoW Protocol smashed a new all time record for daily volume on August 9th, handling more than $100M in volume giving it a 26% market share among DEX aggregators (highest daily market share in the protocol’s history) in the aggregator space. More details here.
- @fleupold and @annamsgeorge participated in the 1st episode of our newly integrated partners @DXdao_. You can find the recording of the podcast here.
Product Updates
Backend
The backend team has been working hard to improve the product infrastructure. In August, they shipped:
- Preparations for The Merge. Which went off (almost) without a hitch.
- Indexing of Uniswap v3 liquidity. We should start seeing CoWs with Uniswap v3 pools in the near future.
- Autopilot component updates, so that it is not responsible for batching auctions — bringing us one step closer to solver+driver co-location.
- Private liquidity. External solvers can now use native CoW protocol liquidity from private market makers to match user orders.
Frontend
The frontend team has been pushing hard for several improvements in the UI front, as well as the overall UI infrastructure. In August, they:
- Started a major refactor of the swap component to improve the maintainability of the project, and to lay important groundwork for the next bullet…
- Started working on the UI for limit orders, which should ship toward the end of this year
- Worked on native ETH Flow
- Deprecated/removed Rinkeby
- Changed the official URL to swap.cow.fi
Open Job Positions
CoW Protocol team is currently looking to hire:
Engineering
Design
Operations
For more information on our latest job openings, visit: https://cow.fi/jobs
About CoW DAO
CoW DAO is an open organization of developers, traders, market makers and many more community members aligned with its vision. CoW DAO is focused on fair and decentralized trading systems — in particular, building, maintaining and advancing the CoW Protocol. CoW Protocol technology powers a network of traders and solvers, enabling trustless and efficient peer-to-peer trading. Leveraging batch auctions as a key concept uniquely positions CoW Protocol as native trading infrastructure for discrete-time settlement layers like Ethereum and enables fair and accessible trading to its users.
Check out our website https://cow.fi/
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