Bringing CoW Protocol to Solana - Launching at 0 bps volume fee

General
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## Summary

Under the mandate of CIP-74, the Core Team proposes deploying CoW Protocol and CoW Swap on Solana - to launch with a 0 bps volume fee across all pairs during an initial bootstrapping period of 12 months. Solana is the largest venue (measured by DEX Volume) where CoW Protocol currently has no presence.

A fee-free launch is intended to attract liquidity, solver participation, and partner integrations before fees are introduced - consistent with the per-pair fee discretion the DAO already granted the Core Team under CIP-74.

## Volume fee approach: launch at 0 bps

We propose launching on Solana with a 0 bps volume fee across all token pairs for an initial period of 12 months. To clarify, this applies only to volume fees and has no impact on price improvement fee or revenue share on Partner Fees.

This is not a new fee policy. Under CIP-74, the DAO delegated the Core Team authority to set the baseline volume-based protocol fee per token pair anywhere in the inclusive range [0.00%, 0.05%]. Setting Solana to 0.00% at launch is an exercise of that existing mandate. The Solana 0 bps entry will be recorded in the Core Team’s per-pair fee registry alongside its justification, exactly as CIP-74 requires. At or before the end of the 12-month period, the Core Team will review Solana economics and determine the appropriate volume-fee level - which may remain 0 bps, grow the to the standard policy or a value in-between.

We expect this policy to ease solver onboarding on the SVM, letting solver teams fine-tune their algorithms to non-EVM flow without an extra optimisation variable.

## Estimating economic impact

While we cannot directly estimate the economic impact of this decision, we expect as a KPI to reach between 1%-5% of addressable (i.e. uncorrelated, non-bot volume) market share.

Given our research, this translates to $3.4B/month addressable market (around 32% of all contestable uncorrelated volume; 16% of all Solana volume). Hence a target monthly volume on Month 12 of $34-170M, which would translate to $ 6.8k-34k of Protocol Fees. Assuming a linear trend, this means the DAO will be forfeiting $44k-221k of Fees, which generate post Solver incentives near 50% of said amount as Gross Margin. We expect this economic loss to be overcome from a quicker volume growth.

## Revenue model - other sources

Because price-improvement fees and partner-fee revenue share still apply, the 0-bps volume-fee waiver does not take Solana revenue to zero — integrator and price-improvement revenue contribute from launch.

We welcome all comments.

3 Likes
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any estimated time of the launch? 0%fee strategy is good to punch the initial demand

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Supportive of the launch, with one observation from a solver’s seat, since the proposal lists solver participation among the things the waiver should attract.

Solver rewards on CoW scale with the chain’s own protocol fees. Per the rewards documentation, each auction’s contribution to the consistency budget is β times the protocol fee collected in that auction (minus the performance reward), and the performance reward itself is capped at β times that fee, with β at 50% on the large chains and up to 100% where the Core Team chooses to set it for a small one. So a chain’s fee take is also its solver budget. With the volume fee at 0 bps for 12 months, that budget is funded only by what remains, essentially the price-improvement fee, and on the proposal’s own month-12 range of $6.8k–34k in monthly protocol fees the entire solver pool comes to roughly $3k–17k a month at β = 50%, or double that at 100%, shared across every solver on the chain, and less than that during the ramp.

Solvers do account for the fee policy (it decides whether a near-limit bid still clears), but it is a detail of the implementation, not what decides whether a team builds and runs an SVM solver. That decision is made on the reward budget against the running cost. The waiver helps users and integrators from day one; on solver participation it works the other way unless something else funds solver rewards through the bootstrap period.

Question for the Core Team: during the 12 months, will Solana solver rewards scale with the (near-zero) fee take as on every other chain, or is an explicit solver-incentive floor planned for the bootstrap period? If the latter, recording it in the fee-registry entry next to the 0 bps justification would let solver teams plan the SVM work with a number in hand.

Kaiser

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Hi @karolak , contracts are already under test, but we expect a public launch / demo of a MVP by October. A more advanced version is to be launched during Q4.

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Hi @kaisersolver , thank you for your question and comment! We see solver unit economics with care and being running costs partially fixed, we consider that the best way to ensure quicker payback / breakeven is that higher volume and/or higher price improvement is generated on CoW Swap’s SVM instance.

Given the type of volume traded in Solana has heavy skewing towards highly volatile assets and a quicker / more time sensitive trading profile (e.g. longer tail assets / memecoins / etc), our intuition is that the lower volume fee will result in quicker volume capture, compensating solvers on the price improvement on higher volume vs. the “lost” volume fee based rewards.

At this time there is no plan to launch an explicit solver incentive.

1 Like