CoW Protocol May 2023 Highlights
TL;DR
- For the month of May, CoW Protocol handled a volume of $770M, generating a total surplus of $5M
- In exciting news, CoW Protocol launched dump.services and Safe bundling of transactions, improved the metamask approval process, and more
- WE ARE HIRING! Find our latest job openings for engineering and businesss here: https://cow.fi/jobs
Protocol Stats
This month, CoW Protocol settled a total of $770M.
This month, the top 3 batches worth highlighting are the following:
- Batch with the highest % of CoW trades (Transaction details): The total batch volume was $104K, and it was created by two traders who were perfectly CoWed for 94% of their volume. One trader was buying $53K of USDC, while the other trader was selling $48K of USDC.
- Batch with the highest volume (Transaction details): The total batch volume was $7.6M and it was created by a single trader who was swapping $7.5M of USDT for $7.6M of USDC.
- Batch with the highest amount of surplus (Transaction details**)**: The total batch volume was $1.4M and it was created by a single trader who was swapping ETH for USDT. This trader generated the most surplus volume in a trade for the month of May, by getting $28.5K USDT extra (2% surplus).
During the month of May, the top 10 traders traded a total of $128M.
In the table below you can see the number of trades that CoW Swap traders executed, as well as their total volume. Our most active trader made a whopping 235 trades with CoW Protocol in May (PS: The top trader is not counted since it’s the CoW Swap ETH Flow Contract).
Solvers
In May, we had one external team add a new solver to our production environment. This solver is named Propeller Heads and the CoW Protocol team is looking forward to seeing how it performs in the competition.
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 May, solvers generated a total of $5M in surplus, which is money in the pockets of traders. The highest generated surplus by a single solver was $1.2M.
Governance
It was a quiet month in terms of governance! The CoW was just chilling.
Executed Proposals
No proposals were executed this month.
Draft Proposals
There were 2 new proposals asking for feedback before moving into the next phase, a final CIP, in their current form.
Technical Discussions
As an “agora” for technical topics on batch auctions or CoW Protocol related topics, the forum surfaced some very interesting posts.
Make sure to read them and leave comments — your feedback is highly appreciated and will help move forward these important topics. If you are interested in submitting a proposal to the CoW DAO, make sure to use the following template.
CoWmunity News
- Integrated Keystone wallet in our wallet modal
- CoW Grants Program funded the creation of DUMP.SERVICES, a project developed by the Yearn Finance team that allows anyone to sell all their tokens in their wallet directly to a single asset
- Improved the Metamask approvals experience in light of their recent changes in the approval modal. With this new change, users can again easily approve tokens like before
- Exactly 1 month ago, CoW Protocol, in collaboration with a number of partners, launched MEVBlocker. It has since protected 231,361 tx from frontrunning
- CoW Protocol and CoW Swap were covered by the Blockworks research team!
- Stablecoin yield backed by tokenized exposure to US Treasuries just got even more accessible! CoW Swap users can now efficiently zap to and from fTokens, made possible by the powerful combination of CoW Swap and the Seasolver by @yearnfi
- MEV Blocker protected ~5% of all transactions on Ethereum. This is without any major wallet integrations
- Organized a Twitter space alongside Bloxroute, Paraswap, Castle, and VirtueSwap titled: To MEV or not To MEV! Find the recording here
- Eigenphi released a report analyzing the impact of MEV in CoW Protocol and found that MEV is one magnitude lower in CoW Protocol than in any other trading venue
- DRPC integrated MEV Blocker
- CoW Swap launched Fortune Cookies to cheer up your day :)
- A great article was posted on Hackernoon on why CoW Swap is a superior method of trading in L1s
- CoW Grants Program funded a study on surplus-capturing AMMs
- CoW Swap team published an article titled “How CoW Swap solves MEV”
- Partnered with a great set of teams to include Degenscore as a criteria for hiring new team members
- Safe Bundling of transactions was released
- The CoW Swap team published an article: “CoW Swap for DAOs”
- The CoW Swap team published an article: “CoW Grants Program Wave 1”
- The CoW Swap team published an article: “How CoW Swap solves MEV”
- Major development from BalancerDAO, as it passed a proposal to offer LP fee Discounts for CoW Protocol solvers in return for forwarding their non toxic flow volume.
Product Updates
Backend
The backend team has been working hard to improve the product infrastructure. In May, we:
- Started working on custom pre and post interactions for the Composable CoW Framework
- Kicked off a grant for implementing automatic indexing of smart contract orders
- Implemented a change to allow external solvers to return multiple solutions and have the driver pick the best valid one once the driver is maintained by solvers
- Worked on the custom order interaction progress
- Supported several teams during the EthLisbon Hackathon
- Worked on the autopilot side of things for CIP-20
- Reviewed brahma integration
- Made progress on “verified quotes”, which are quotes (price estimates) verified by a simulation
Frontend
The frontend team published several improvements to the UI, as well as the overall UI infrastructure. In May, we:
- Improved the approval context in CoW Swap after a new Metamask release broke our flow of gas-less transactions
- Improved confirmations for Safe users and mobile wallets that were experiencing issues with blocked confirmations. A nicer UX now prevents these issues
- Launched the 🥠 Fortune Cookie
- Worked on the TWAP Order Implementation, specifying architecture design for trade interfaces (Swap, limit orders, advanced orders)
- Launched the first feature of bundling transactions for Safe users
- Started specification New API for “Backend for frontend”
- Fixed USDT token approval (it required an initial transaction with an amount of 0; now it’s back to normal)
Open Job Positions
The CoW Protocol team is currently hiring for:
Business Development
Business Development Team Lead Remote or Lisbon
Engineering
Software Engineering Team Lead Remote or Lisbon
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.
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