Earlier this week, I did a deep dive on a new DEX trading protocol called CowSwap, which combines many good features into what is possibly the most complete trading experience in Defi.
- First, you no longer publish a fee-paying transaction to the public mempool. Instead, you sign a transaction and submit it off-chain to the CowSwap relayer, which handles all the execution. For you, this means you can safely set a very low slippage tolerance because you only ever pay a fee if your trade succeeds.
- Second, and this gets us to real innovation, CowSwap looks for so-called “coincidents of wants” or CoWs before sending your order to the regular on-chain exchanges. For example, if one trader wants to buy ETH at a certain price and another wants to sell it, these two can be matched without paying any LP fees. Off-chain solvers can look at this orderbook and submit optimal matchings that among others, guarantee that all trades in a certain batch have to settle at the same uniform price. Because there’s no point in reordering trades that have the same price, this also eliminates MEV as well.
- Only after all coincidents have been exhausted, CowSwap sends the rest of the order to the on-chain exchanges via smart routers like 1Inch
If you didn’t get all of that immediately, don’t worry – neither did I, and that’s why I invited Felix Leupold from CowSwap and Gnosis to answer my remaining questions. Please enjoy my conversation on CowSwap with Felix Leupold.
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1 Reply to “#26: Is CowSwap the most innovative DEX? w/ Hasu and Felix Leupold”
Great article! I really appreciate the clear and detailed insights you’ve provided on this topic. It’s always refreshing to read content that breaks things down so well, making it easy for readers to grasp even complex ideas. I also found the practical tips you’ve shared to be very helpful. Looking forward to more informative posts like this! Keep up the good work!