Dec 23, 2022

6 min read

CoW Protocol November 2022 Highlights

Welcome back to another CoW Update, where we break down the most notable developments of the previous month at CoW Protocol.

TL;DR

For the month of November, CoW Protocol handled a volume of $1.66B with the total amount of surplus generated totaling $6.38M
We smashed old records and ranked #2 in DEX aggregator market share for the month 📈
In Governance, CowDAO executed CIP-15, which implemented a change in the solver rewards scheme, and CIP-16, which claimed the SAFE tokens airdropped to CoW DAO Safes
On the technical side, CoW Protocol integrated ERC1271 orders for smart contracts and shepherded the launch of Seasolver 🧜‍♂️ from Yearn
We made key hires across biz dev, engineering, and ops — and we’re still hiring even more core team members! Find our latest job openings at https://cow.fi/jobs

Protocol Stats

In November, CoW Protocol settled a total of $1.66B.

This month, the top 3 batches to highlight are the following:

Batch with the highest % of CoW trades (transaction details): The total batch volume was $58,648.30, and it was created by three traders who were perfectly CoWed for 99.6% of their volume. One trader was selling CRV for USDC (roughly $28.3K), another trader was selling USDC for CRV (roughly $29K), and the last trader was selling CRV for USDC (roughly $600)

Batch with the highest volume (transaction details): The total batch volume was $32.43M and it was created by a single trader who was swapping USDC to USDT

Batch with the highest amount of surplus (Transaction details): The Batch Total volume was $1,739,900 and it was created by a single trader who was swapping APE to ETH. This trader achieved the largest surplus for the month of November, by getting $259,960.15 extra (9.76% surplus) for his trade (!!!).

During the month of November, the top 10 traders traded a total of $33.8M.

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 396 (!!!) trades with CoW Protocol in November.

Solvers

In November, we saw two external teams add new solvers to our staging environment. These solvers are named Quasilabs and Raven, and the CoW Protocol team is looking forward to seeing how they perform in the competition.

Looking at this table, we can see that on average, for the month of November, solvers were able to generate a total of $6.3M of surplus, which all traders got to enjoy in their pockets.

In regards to the solver statistics, one can find all sorts of information in the following table like total value settled, number of batches solved, trades and surplus. The highest generated surplus by a solver was $ 2.1M.

Governance

November was a hectic month in terms of governance! The CoW cannot be stopped by the bear 💪.

Executed Proposals

This month we executed two important and impactful proposals:

CIP-16: Claim and Delegate SAFE Tokens — This proposal aims to claim SAFE tokens allocated to CoW DAO’s main Safe as well as any other Safe operated on behalf of CoW DAO. In addition to claiming, it is proposed that all claimed tokens will be delegated to cowguardian.eth to enable CoW DAOs participation in the Safe governance
CIP-15: Risk-adjusted solver rewards — This CIP asks that CoW DAO becomes the official owner of the solver bond (0x5d4020b9261F01B6f8a45db929704b0Ad6F5e9E6) and reimburses Nomev Labs, though they will continue to be responsible for running the bonding pool

Draft Proposals

There was one new proposal asking for feedback before moving to a final CIP:

Laertes Capital market making line of credit. The proposal asked for CoW DAO to grant Laertes Capital LLC a DAI line of credit to use for market making activities and possibly solver development. These loans would be subject to an interest rate of 5% and the line of credit must be unwound by the end of Q1 2023 for review

If you are interested in submitting a proposal to the CoW DAO, make sure to check the following template.

CoWmunity News

CoW Protocol now supports ERC1271 signatures. ERC1271 makes it possible to trade gaslessly on CoW Protocol with any Smart Contract or Smart Contract wallet and enables all sorts of exotic order types on CoW Protocol
The CoW Protocol team participated in the MEV roundtable at 0xpo
CoW Protocol smashed a new record. The protocol handled more than $195M in volume — its highest daily volume of the past 6 months — and ranked #2 in DEX aggregator market share for the month
Yearn’s Seasolver 🧜‍♂️ made it into production! And it came with a lot of new features. Exotic tokens, anyone?
After seeing an uptick in the number of bad actors impersonating CoW Swap, we have partnered with @ChainPatrol to help identify scammers
Felix wrote a new post in the forum about how price disparity created by current AMM designs is the root cause of MEV and how CoW Native AMMs (aka surplus-capturing AMMs with a single price clearing) would protect LPs while giving better prices
MEV is the Millennium Prize Problem of crypto, and CoW Swap is ready to take a stab at reducing it
CoW Swap’s Token Terminal page launched
Read our blog post about building fairer DEXs: Towards fairer DEXs in Ethereum

Product Updates

Backend

The backend team worked hard to improve the product infrastructure. In November we:

Improved information flow for external solvers
Improved the price estimator trade simulation to get more realistic quotes and simulate transactions aggregators are quoting
Improved AMM slippage handling
Improved auction id to tx hash association
Debugged node stability issues
Evaluated external node providers

Frontend

The frontend team pushed hard for several improvements on the UI front, as well as the overall UI infrastructure. In November we:

Redesigned the CoW Swap UI
Enabled a new swap form as default and added new routing format
Release a new version of the Explorer v2.15.0
Integrated Blocknative as a source for mainet gas prices

Open Job Positions

The CoW Protocol team is currently looking to hire:

Engineering

Other

Name Your Role Remote — Lisbon — Berlin

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

That’s all for November — the December update will be here before you know it. 👋

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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