How to use CoW Swap Native ETH sell flow

Step by step guide

The CoW ETH Flow Contract is a new way of trading on CoW Protocol. This new way of trading is specifically designed to handle ETH, since the CoW Protocol Settlement Contract is only compatible with ERC20 tokens.

This new swapping method was developed for those users who have ETH (and no WETH) in their wallets, and thus do not have WETH approved in the settlement contract. The goal of this new swapping flow is to avoid forcing the user to convert their ETH into WETH and having them set the approval of WETH in the settlement contract, thus saving time and costs in the process.

The reason that an intermediary smart contract needs to be involved in this process is because you cannot sign an intent to trade with ETH. Since you cannot sign an intent to trade, and CoW Protocol only works with intents, we developed a custom smart contract that auto-converts your ETH into WETH to later place an ERC1271 order (intent) on your behalf. To learn more about the design of the contract, click here for the full explanation.

How to place a native ETH sell order with CoW Swap’s UI:

To place a native ETH Sell order on CoW Swap, you need to do the following:

Go to swap.cow.fi and connect your wallet.

Once your wallet is connected, you are ready to select the tokens you want to trade.

First, we select the sell token, in this case ETH

After you have selected ETH as your sell token, then you need to select the token you want to buy, which for the sake of this guide, we will pick the COW token.

Once you have ETH as the sell token, and you have selected the buy token, COW, you need to decide the amount of ETH you want to sell. After you have selected the amount, the following screen should appear:

In that screen, you will see the “normal” parameters you are used to in CoW Swpa, although some are modified. Lets go over each one of them.

• The price at which your trade will execute
• The fees that your trade will incur when you sign the order
• The slippage tolerance (modified) in this case → When selling ETH, the minimum slippage tolerance is set to 2% to ensure a high likelihood of order matching, even in volatile market conditions. As a reminder, orders on CoW Swap are always protected from MEV, so your slippage tolerance cannot be exploited.
• The transaction expiration deadline (modified) → ETH orders require a minimum expiration threshold of 10 minutes to ensure sufficient time for matching. Orders not matched after this threshold are automatically refunded.
• The Fee discount, which varies depending on the amount of CoW tokens you hold in the wallet you are using for trading.
• Additionally, when selling ETH, you will see a new banner that tells you to “Wrap your ETH and use the classic WETH experience!”

If you click on it, the toggle will expand and explain to you that you can also use the classic CoW Swap experience by wrapping your ETH. The toggle will prompt you to wrap your ETH to WETH before placing your order. This way, you’ll take of advantage of:

• Lower overall fees
• Lower default slippage (instead of 2% minimum)
• No fees for failed transactions

Although this option is available, the point of this new ETH Sell is to avoid you having to go through this flow. For this, we will close the banner and go back to ETH sell flow. Once you have closed it, now you’re ready to place the ETH sell order. For that, you just need to to click on the “swap” button.

Once you have done so, a final confirmation modal will appear with a summary of the ETH sell order details you are about to place.

If you’re sure you want to proceed, click the “Confirm” button. Afterwards, a popup should appear showing the status of the order submission message. Additionally, the wallet you are using should prompt you to execute the transaction the ETH sell order submission.

As you can read in this article, the ETH sell flow has a different UX than other ERC20 tokens. In order to be able to sell ETH, it’s required that you send your ETH to an intermediary CoW smart contract (production and barn).

After submitting your transaction onchain, the ETH sell order you placed is submitted to CoW Protocol intermediary ETH contract so that it can place the order on your behalf.

Once the contract has received your ETH, the screen modal will change and mark the first two steps: (1) Send ETH and (2) Create Order, as successful.

The former step triggers the CoW ETH Flow Contract to create a ERC1271 smart contract order with the parameters that you specified in the UI. The order is then registered in CoW Protocol’s batch auction so that the solvers take it into consideration when settling the batch.

Once the order is placed by the CoW ETH Flow Contract, you can check the order submission through the hyperlink under the circle icon. Once you have clicked on it, you will be redirected to the CoW Explorer, where you will see your order details and the status of it.

After you have checked the validity of your order, you can go back to the CoW Swap UI. Now you only have to wait until your order is filled, you can either wait until the progress bar reaches the end, or play the COW runner game to distract yourself a bit ;)

Regardless of what you decide, as soon as the order is filled, the UI will markt the last icon as complete and you will receive the tokens you sold your ETH for, in this case, COW.

Additionally, in the event that you want to place another swap in the meantime, and at some point want to come back and check on your ETH sell order status. On the top right corner, if you click on your wallet, the following history panel will appear with all the information related to your order.

For more questions regarding limit orders, please refer to the FAQ section in the website.

We wish you much surplus and happy ETH Sell order trading!

About CoW DAO

CoW DAO is an open organization of developers, traders, market makers, and other community members focused on building, maintaining, and advancing fair and decentralized trading systems — principally through its work on CoW Protocol.

CoW Protocol is a DEX aggregation protocol that powers a network of independent solvers which, in turn, enable trustless and efficient peer-to-peer trading. Leveraging batch auctions uniquely positions CoW Protocol as native trading infrastructure for discrete-time settlement layers like Ethereum and enables fair and accessible trading to its users.

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