Nov 18, 2022

8 min read

CoW Protocol October 2022 Highlights

Welcome back to another CoW Update, where we break down the most notable developments of the last few weeks at CoW Protocol.

TL;DR

For the month of October, CoW Protocol handled a volume of $712M with the total amount of surplus generated for that month was $2.48M .
In terms of Governance, CowDAO executed CIP-14, which introduced a method for redistributing the COW rewards to solvers across the user orders they settled to better reflect execution risk.
In regard to exciting news, CoW Protocol took over Bogota during ETHBogota, and Devcon VI, launched the CoW Grants Program, as well as a few other exciting news around the product.
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 October, CoW Protocol settled a total of $ 712,074,259

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 $ 39,078.18 , and it was created by two traders who were perfectly CoWed for 99.1 % of their volume. One trader was buying 11.9 WETH for USDC (roughly 19,565 USDC), while the other trader was selling 19,565 USDC for WETH (roughly 11.9 WETH) .

Batch with the highest Volume in it (Transaction details): The Batch Total volume was $9,905,377.52 and it was created by a single trader who was swapping FRAX to DAI.

Batch with the highest amount of surplus (Transaction details): The Batch Total volume was $37,547.36 and it was created by a single trader who was swapping stETH to USDC. This trader achieved the largest surplus for the month of October, by getting $37,547.36 USDC extra (0.58% surplus).

During the month of October, the top 10 traders have traded a total of $50 M

In the table below you can see the # of trades they have executed as well as the total volume for all their trades. Our most active trader made a whopping 651(!!!) trades with CoW Protocol in October.

Solvers

In October, we saw two external teams add a new solver to our staging and production environment. These solvers are named Seasolver 🧜‍♀️ and Barter, and the CoW Protocol team is looking forward to seeing how they perform in the competition.

Barter Solver entered the shadow competition.
Seasolver🧜‍♀️ (by Yearn Finance) went live into production mid October and has been flexing a lot by testing directly in prod.

Looking at this table, we can see that on average, for the month of October Solvers were able to generate a total of $2,482,596, 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 $622,510.

Governance

It has been a hectic month in terms of governance! The CoW cannot be stopped by a bear at all 💪.

Executed Proposals

This month we executed one important and impactful proposal

CIP-14: Risk-adjusted solver rewards: introduces a method for redistributing COW rewards based on the risk incurred by solvers when settling different types of orders. You can find all the information in CoW Snapshot space.

Draft Proposals

This month, there were three new proposals asking for feedback before they move into the next phase, a final CIP, in their current form.

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, even though they will continue to be responsible for running the bonding pool.
CIP-14: Risk-adjusted solver rewards: introduces a method for redistributing COW rewards based on the risk incurred by solvers when settling different types of orders.

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

CoWmunity News

The CoW Protocol team participated in ETHBogota as a sponsor, with two bounties:

Build the most-creative demo of ERC-1271 to place orders on CoW Protocol — i.e. stop losses, Time Weighted Average Price (TWAP) orders, Good After Time (GAT) etc
Build the most-creative frontend on top of CoW Protocol. More information is available here.

CoW Protocol had various hacking submissions for ETHBogota such as (More information available here):

Curved Orders are a new smart order type for CoW Protocol which implement pricing curve logic
SmartCow Protocol is an automatic DCA protocol built on top of CoW Swap
Superseed: Simple, automated dollar cost averaging dApp paired with community impact to supercharge your DeFi investment strategy
The Social Off-Ramp Debit Card. Allowing crypto users to off-ramp conveniently and Tap & Go
DeFi aggregator for users to manage liquidity pool in multiple DeFi protocols in one interface

After taking over ETHBogota, it was time for the CoW Team to take over Devcon VI. CoW Protocol participated in Devcon VI with four talks:

@AnnaMSGeorge: One Block, One Batch: Examining the Potential of Frequent Batch Auctions in Ethereum. Full talk available here.
@VinyasAlex: The Fight for MEV. Full talk available here.
Federico Giacon: MEV Capturing AMMs(McAMMs). Full talk available here.
@fleupold_: Towards Fairer DEXs on Ethereum. Full talk available here.

Not only did the CoW Protocol team take over the Devcon VI stages, but our engineers also had time to win the Devcon scavenger hunt, showcasing the top engineering talent behind this team. If you can’t beat ’em join them.

This year, the CoW Protocol Front End team went to another level to deliver an outstanding Halloween UI update.

Anna George, CEO at CoW Protocol made a daring post about the current reality of Ethereum and the state of censorship. You can read it here.

Launched the CoW Grants Program, where anyone can submit an application to get compensated for work that advances the CoW Protocol ecosystem. These are not just rewards for jobs that need to be done — they are investments in the future of the community and the future of CoW Protocol. More information available here and on the CoW Grants website.

The CoW Protocol Data team published the article “Do cows slippage less?” to showcase how ~ 50% of trades you make on a DEX or Aggregator don’t get settled at the price you see in the UI and how these aggregators actually compare to each other.

Product Updates

Backend

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

Improved the EventHandler for fetching events with each new block (enabling an increase of the max reorg block number from 25 to 64 without any performance losses).
Adapted the solver limit precision for the objective value comparison for solver solutions.
Developed some PRs for the upcoming native ETH sell flow.
Made more information available for external solvers teams.
Finalized the trade simulation for DEX aggregator price estimates
Implemented several tasks for solver teams, such as notification endpoint callback for the solvers, AMM contact addresses and bufferable tokens in JSON instance.
Continued progressing on the Limit Order tasks.
Added order classification to orders
Made Limit orders available via the API (behind a CLI flag)

Frontend

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

Released a new CoW Swap version which added a big refactor to the UI code.
Hacked the “Skate CoW” → A UI that watches for new orders placed in CoW Swap. Then, the user has 30 seconds to place the counter-order of the orders show in the Skate CoW UI.
Released a new CoW Swap UI with the Hallowen theme of 2022.
Continued working on the design of Limit orders.
Released the CoW Protocol Grants Program website, available @ grants.cow.fi
Finished setting up Vercel for CoW Swap.
Continued working on the native ETH sell flow.
Hired a new Quality Assurance engineer.

Open Job Positions

The CoW Protocol team is currently looking to hire:

Engineering

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

That’s all for September — the October 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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