Home Knowledge BaseCoW Protocol May 2023 Highlights

CoW Protocol May 2023 Highlights

6 min read

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.

Towards a stronger price estimation competition

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)