Program overview

The mission of the CoW Grants Program is to provide funding to help grow CoW Protocol’s ecosystem. For this, CoW Protocol is dedicating 600K wXDAI and 600K COW tokens worth of funds for the first 6 months of the grants being live.

The primary areas of growth for CoW Protocol under this proposal are defined as:

• CoWmunity growth
• User interface and user experience (UI/UX)
• Decentralization
• Solver development
• Developer tools (SDK)
• Integrations and protocol order flow
• Other/misc

The judgment criteria for the grant applications will be based on the following:

• Feasibility - Is the grant feasible to do at this moment or does the grant require upgrades in the protocol layer or overall ecosystem?
• Impact for the CoW ecosystem - How much of a positive impact will this grant have to the overall CoW Protocol ecosystem?
• Sanity - Is the amount of workload required for this grant accurate? 
• Technical expertise of the grantee/s - Does the grantee have the technical expertise to deliver the grant milestones?

As CIP-8 lays out, the CoW Grants Program Safe is managed by two different multi-signature wallets. Safe #3 is shared with the CoW DAO (Safe #1) and the Grants Committee (Safe #2). Safe #3 holds all the grant funds. You can check the governing process in the image below:

Application Process:

1. Initial public application
   Anyone can submit an application to the CoW Grants Program. They just need to use the grant application form and follow the instructions in the FAQ
   
   
2. Application review
   The CoW Grants Committee will review grant applications as soon as they possibly can. The committee is not obligated to move or rush a specific proposal to the review stage and will do so based on its sole discretion.
   
   
3. Committee feedback
   After the committee reviews applications, the following outcomes are possible:
   • The committee finds the application a successful and approves the grant
   • The committee denies the grant, and that is the end of the process
   • The committee meets with the grant applicant and reworks the application together with the applicant to ensure it aligns well with CGP goals. Once updated, the application may be reconsidered
   
   
4. Grant approval
   The CoW Grants Program Committee will show preference toward successful grants in a public forum poll where all committee members are required to vote before moving a grant to its final stage
   
   
5. Grant structuring & management
   Once the grant is approved, the committee will outline a series of milestones to be achieved to obtain full funding. Grantees will be compensated for reaching each milestone, successively, and – if they are not achieved – the CoW Grants Committee reserves the right to close the grant or stop payment until specific milestones are achieved

For questions relating to the CoW Grants Program application process, please visit our FAQ page.

Request for Proposals

The following is a non-exhaustive list of potential projects that the CoW Grants Program might have an interest in funding.

1. Trading-related applications
1. Trading view UI for Degen CoWs → Think advanced trading type views from places like DEX.guru, Kraken, Coinbase Pro, etc.
2. Limit order interface → Develop a custom limit order mechanism that works with CoW Protocol
3. DCA order interface → Build an interface that allows a user to submit orders in batches to be executed in various time horizons
4. Cross chain trading → Achieve cross chain order books & CoWs
5. Wait for CoW → Develop a feature that allows users to signal the fact that they would rather wait for a CoW, instead of executing at the first possible moment
2. Analytics
1. Dashboard about DEX activity on other networks (Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, BSC, etc.)
2. Protocol level analytics
1. Dashboard to display CoWs (Coincidences of Wants)
2. Governance Analytics
3. Tooling
1. Language specific clients to ease the development of other tools such as interfaces
4. Solvers
1. Develop a Solver specialized in weighted pools
2. Develop a Solver specialized in finding CoWs
3. Develop a Solver specialized in tapping into private liquidity
5. Integrations
1. Build/achieve an integration from a major DeFi platform to route orders into CoW Protocol
6. Education
1. How-to guides (written or video). For example:
1. How to swap tokens
2. How CoW Protocol works
3. How to build a solver
4. How Solvers work
5. Using vault relayers
6. Understanding the CoW Protocol API
2. International language documentation, e.g. French, Spanish, German, Chinese, etc.
3. Content creation → Articles, papers, etc. that focus on the technicalities of CoW Protocol
7. Design
1. Create Graphics (Art) Material for the CoWmunity: → Memes, CoW worlds, POAPs, images, explainer GIFs, etc.
2. CoW POAP/NFT creative use cases → We want to have the most awesome POAPs & NFTs across town. We are looking for creators to improve our design, style, distribution methods, and ways to display POAPs

Grants Committee

The CoW Grants Program committee is comprised of 7 CoWmunity members. They are:

• @netrunner.eth - 0xc95Fda8A94437c1B936169b62858F13aE0386307
• @Kubesqrt - 0x386b4ba873a4f423ca28a4df1b2347ca949ced0e
• @Chim9 - 0xF44217A8b6b3f258BFFEaD635c226528aa516aea
• @mfw78 - 0x0F641723997145715d23c0129b96041011d26666
• @middleway.eth - 0xa11da8b2d9a7883eb636d7de426025e5fd9fda1a
• @Master_CoW - 0x76ba9825a5f707f133124e4608f1f2dd1ef4006a
• @fairlight - 0xCA55E77Ec514B5BD05B3b2B56f106Ba2Fe593A9f

Safe #2 (see diagram above), gno:0xCA1F000D520c21C47E6c634DD31b92b91A6338bD functions as the CoW Grants Program committee Safe. The Safe has a signing threshold of 5 out of 7, and each of these committee members is a signer.

All committee members have provided a brief description of their background on the CIP forum discussion. The committee can be reached via the CoW Protocol forum or Discord - or at grants@cow.fi.