TLDR;

In the rapidly evolving world of DeFi, CoW Protocol and its community have made notable strides, driven by the force of the GrantsDAO. This article provides a comprehensive overview of some of the most significant projects that the GrantsDAO (reelected in January 2023) has successfully funded and completed.

These initiatives, ranging from feasibility studies to protocol enhancements, demonstrate the commitment of CoW Protocol’s community to fostering innovation, enhancing transparency, and driving efficient value distribution within the DeFi space.

Let’s take a detailed look at the grants we funded in the second half of the period. The first half is covered in part 1.

Andrew, Evan, and Mohammed proposed the grant “Surplus-capturing AMMs — a feasibility study” which successfully addressed a prevailing issue in the constant function market maker (CFMM) model. The issue revolved around surplus value captured by arbitrageurs and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) searchers, often disadvantaging users and liquidity providers (LPs).

The team proposed a distinctive automated market maker (AMM) design that would custody its own liquidity while using pricing discovered by CoW Protocol’s solvers. This AMM aimed to provide improved pricing for CoW users and yield for LPs from passive liquidity provision without the usual exposure to adverse selection.

The project, which ran over a 6–8 weeks timeline, was fully funded by the GrantsDAO, and the team successfully completed their research. They developed a high-level candidate architecture for the “surplus-capturing” AMM and a quantitative model of the additional value that could be delivered to LPs and users.

The final deliverable was a comprehensive technical report and a GitHub repository containing the code used for the studies. The completion of this grant marked a significant step forward in refining the dynamics of AMM designs and highlighted ways AMMs can be improved.

In a successful initiative by @itsahedge, the GrantsDAO funded the creation of a CoW Protocol Golang SDK/client and a CoW Protocol TWAP/DCA CLI bot/app. This project aimed to simplify the integration of CoW Protocol into Go applications, providing developers with a ready-to-use client and eliminating the need to create their own API.

The grant was structured in multiple milestones, with the first, the CoW Protocol Golang SDK/client (funded at $10k) delivered in two installments. Upon completion, the grantee delivered a comprehensive Golang SDK with documentation and example implementation code. This completed project now paves the way for future applications and tools within the CoW Protocol ecosystem, fostering its continued growth.

Undertaken by mfw78, this grant implemented advanced TWAP order types for CoW Protocol via EIP-1271 smart contract orders. This unique feature in the DeFi market enhances CoW Protocol’s utility and increases order concentration.

The grant was structured with key milestones, including the implementation of a user-upgradeable proxy contract with TWAP logic, a factory contract for users to deploy from, a comprehensive test suite for contracts, an example script for submitting TWAP orders off-chain to CoW Protocol, and relevant documentation for integrators/developers.

CoW DAO funded this project with $10,000 distributed in two installments and oversaw its completion in January 2023. This initiative has successfully enhanced the CoW Protocol with advanced order types, contributing to its ongoing growth and utility of CoW Protoocol.

Completed by the team of Majorfi, Saltyfacu, and Poolpitako, who are experienced developers with various successful deployments such as ape.tax, bowswap.finance, smold.app, and rarityextended.com. This project aimed to enhance CoW Protocol’s utility by launching dump.services, a platform that enables users to efficiently sell multiple tokens in a single transaction.

The main feature of dump.services is allowing users to consolidate their wallet contents into a single token. dump.services does this by listing the user’s tokens, showing balances and approval states, and enabling them to select which tokens they want to sell. The orders are then sent to the CoW Protocol API simultaneously.

The team also added functionality for SAFE users including token approval batching and pre-signed batches. This feature has helped increase the number of CoWs in the system, thus reducing costs and increasing surplus.

The project was completed within a month, following which the CoW Grant Committee reviewed it. CoW DAO funded the project with 40k xDAI: half paid upfront and the remainder upon the website’s production readiness. The funding covered domain and server costs, with the majority allocated for front-end development, design, and marketing salaries. This successful integration of dump.services has contributed to the growth and functionality of the CoW Protocol.

Developed by @YellowCurtain3, an experienced developer involved in various CoW Swap-related projects, including CoW Feeder and CoW Bot. This project’s objective was to enhance CoW Protocol’s reach and engagement via a Twitter bot.

The key feature of this project was to develop a script capable of identifying COW transactions and building a Twitter bot to communicate this information. This tool adds significant value to the community by providing real-time updates on COW transactions. The project further contributes to the CoWmunity growth initiative by fostering engagement and keeping the community informed about the latest transactions.

The CoW Grants committee has successfully backed a pioneering project led by @celkacelka, the founder of Rotki. Rotki, known for its open-source portfolio tracking, analytics, and tax reporting capabilities, has always placed user privacy above all else. The primary objective of this grant-backed project was to incorporate CoW Swap’s trading history into the Rotki platform, enhancing the usability of the platform while promoting user experience.

This integration, made possible through the grant, offers users an easy way to view and manage their CoW Swap transactions directly within Rotki. A standout feature of this addition is the precise decoding of transactions, which offers an added layer of transparency. When users initiate a Profit and Loss (PnL) report, the report includes CoW Swap decoded trades, thereby comprehensively evaluating their on-chain activity.

As part of the broader CoWmunity growth initiative, this grant-funded project emphasizes the importance of a trustworthy, auditable, and privacy-focused platform for CoW Swap traders to track their trade history. This increases CoW Protocol’s overall transparency and enables CoW Swap users to see their transactions within the Rotki app.

This grant-funded integration was strategically split into two key milestones. The initial stage involved implementing and testing transaction decoders for CoW Swap transactions on Ethereum mainnet. Following this, the second stage focused on the development of the user interface for the CoW Swap decoders within Rotki, culminating in their deployment in a Rotki production release. This project was made possible through a grant totalling $9k xDAI, with the CoW Swap Integration Grant contributing $6k and Rotki providing the remaining $3k.

Led by Pmcgoohan of zeromev.org, an established developer with two decades of experience in automated trading systems, a significant project has been accomplished under the CoW Protocol’s Grant committee. The ZeroMEV Data API project emphasizes accessibility and transparency of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) data on Ethereum, which was previously limited.

With the ZeroMEV Data API project, transaction granularity MEV summary data sourced from zeromev.org is now published via a public API. This data access is unrestricted for CoW Protocol, Zeromev, and their partners, with a minimum provisioning and maintenance period of 12 months.

The project’s main goal was to increase transparency and awareness around MEV’s problematic nature, and in doing so, promote sustainable solutions. Some potential use cases built on top of the proposed API include comparing value extracted from users by the DEX protocol, comparing the amount of MEV incidents for every MEV type split by DEX protocol, and providing educational snippets on CoW Swap to inform about MEV incidents when interacting with various DeFi protocols.

The project was funded with 30k xDAI, half paid upfront and the remaining upon completion. This funding ensured the successful development and maintenance of the integration, leading to a significant increase in the transparency and awareness of MEV issues in the CoW Protocol community.

Drawing upon his extensive experience with smart contract development, mfw78 has successfully led the development and implementation of the ‘Safe Composable Conditional Orders’ project, an initiative supported by the GrantsDAO.

The Safe Composable Conditional Orders project was built to address the challenge of creating a standard for the limitless options of EIP-1271 orders. This standard aims to reduce the number of contract deployments required, increase gas efficiency, and enhance the user experience. The solution mfw78 proposed was a “Conditional Order Router” Fallback handler, with Conditional Orders summarized in a merkle tree. The root of this tree is signed by the Safe to confirm its accuracy, enabling limitless simultaneous conditional orders to accommodate countless use cases.

The impact of this project is substantial. It not only enhances the utility of CoW Protocol through composable DeFi-market unique order types but also mitigates user experience friction for multiple conditional order types.

The project was completed in one phase over four weeks, with a budget of $10,000. The CoW DAO disbursed half of the payment upfront, and the remaining will be sent upon the satisfactory completion of the code, as determined by the CoW team.

The GrantsDAO has proven to be a significant contributor to the CoW Swap community. Through its consistent funding and support of important projects, the GrantsDAO has played a crucial role in CoW Swap’s development, fostering a DeFi environment that’s more transparent, user-friendly, and equitable. By facilitating numerous innovative grants, the GrantsDAO has successfully expanded the functionality and reach of CoW Protocol. As we look to the future, the projects completed under the GrantsDAO highlight the ongoing growth and untapped potential of the DeFi sector.