CoW Protocol February 2023 Highlights

TL;DR

• During the month of February, CoW Protocol handled a volume of $1.01B, with a total of $6M in generated surplus.
• In terms of Governance, CowDAO executed 4 CIPS, new Solver rewards, Token Discounts renewals, barter Solver slashing due to exploit, and Solver rewards budget renewal.
• In exciting news, had the biggest trade made by a DAO ever, with ENS trading $16M worth of ETH, also CoW DAO turned 1 year old, CoW Protocol had two open calls for feedback, and CoW Swap users can now enable wallet to wallet notifications to stay on top of all CoW-related news, and more :)

Protocol Stats

Over the course of the month, CoW Protocol settled a total of $ 1.01 billion

This month, the 3 highlight batches are the following:

• Batch with the highest % of CoW trades (Transaction details). The Batch Total volume was $202,310.39, and it was created by two traders who were perfectly CoWed for 97.4% of their volume. One trader was buying $94.5K USDC, while the other trader was selling $100K USDC .

• Batch with the highest volume (Transaction details): The Batch Total volume was $16,336,549.02 and it was created by two traders who were swapping DAI-ETH and WETH-USDC.

• Batch with the highest amount of surplus (Transaction details): The Batch Total volume was $16,336,549.02 and it was created by two traders who were swapping DAI-ETH and WETH-USDC. One trader achieved the largest surplus for the month of $81,542.01, by getting $81K USDC extra, which at the time of trade was roughly 0.5% surplus.

During the month of February, the top 10 traders traded a total of $129M

In the table below you can see the number of trades that CoW Swap traders have executed, as well as the total volume for all trades. Our most active trader made a whopping 2889 trades with CoW Protocol in February.

Solvers

You can find all of the Solver Statistics in the following table. Looking at this table, we can see that on average, for the month of February, Solvers were able to generate a total of $6M, which was money in the pockets of traders. The highest generated surplus by a Solver was $1.5M.

Governance

It has been a hectic month in terms of governance! The CoW cannot be stopped by any bears 💪

Executed Proposals

This month there were 4 proposals executed:

• ✅ CIP-20: Auction model for Solver rewards
• ❌ CIP-21: Renewing budget for COW token holders trading fee discount
• ✅ CIP-22: Slashing of the Barter Solver (responsible for a hack causing CoW DAO a loss of 1 week fee accrual)
• ✅ CIP-23: Renewing the Solver reward budget

Draft Proposals

This month, there have been 4 new proposals asking for feedback before moving into the next phase, a final CIP, in their current form:

• CIP-20: Auction model for Solver rewards
• CIP-21: Renewing budget for COW token holders trading fee discount
• CIP-22: Slashing of the Barter Solver (responsible for a hack causing CoW DAO a loss of 1 week fee accrual)
• CIP-23: Renewing the Solver reward budget

Technical Discussions

Our forum serves as an “agora” for technical topics on batch auctions or CoW Protocol related topics, so check out some of the interesting posts that surfaced throughout the month.

Make sure to read them and leave comments as your feedback is very valuable and will help move forward these important topics. If you are interested in submitting a proposal to the CoW DAO, make sure to follow the following template.

CoWmunity News

• February was the month for feedback. CoW Swap had a call for DAO research and Limit Orders. Feedback is taken quite seriously at CoW Swap.
• Unlike some other DEXes, CoW Swap provides only true volume. CoW Swap volume is 100% legit and contains 0% volume coming from arbitrageurs.
• CoW Swap took part in the Monday campaign, alongside many other DeFi projects to voice our support for the DeFi values of the industry.
• On February 7th 2023, CoW Swap’s settlement contract suffered a drain whereby a hacker exploited an external Solver and used it to drain the settlement contract, which held 7 days worth of protocol fees. Here you can read more about the full post mortem of the situation, and here you can check the return of the stolen funds.
• An @ensdomains vote to sell 10K worth of ETH through CoW Swap passed, and the $16M trade was executed later that week with a total of $80K in surplus. In case you missed it, here is the twitter spaces held by CoW Swap and ENS recapping this exciting event.
• February 11th was a day of celebration for us as CoW DAO Turned 1 year old.
• Celebrated CoW Valentines day with our p2p lovers
• February was also a month full of important governance decisions with four CIPs being voted on.
• You’ll now be able to receive CoW Swap notifications directly to your wallet. CoW Swap has partnered with @wherever_im & @pushprotocol to give you access to on-chain communications! You decide what notifications you receive.
• The end of February marked the beginning of ETH Denver. CoW Swap prepared bounties for the hackathon.

Product Updates

Backend

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

• Improved the speed for quoting limit orders
• Improved market order matching
• Executed several internal changes for colocation with specific e2e tests
• Ported Solvers to the colocation model
• Improved the overall e2e testing infrastructure
• Worked on CIP-20 auction based Solver rewards
• Improved some bad token error messages to make it easier for people to debug their errors

Frontend

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

• Worked on several design updates for Limit Orders
• Developed a new Token list and process for adding new external tokens link
• Worked on several wallet integrations for allowing users to connect multiple wallets to CoW Swap natively
• Worked on the Cow SDK refactoring. Created the SDK for order book API with code generated from Swagger
• Worked on Bundling of Multiple Transactions, we started a prototype, a flow chart, and the documentation / specs

Open Job Positions

CoW Protocol team is currently NOT looking to hire :(

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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