CIP-75: Partner Incentive Alignment - Partner Fee, Partner Price Improvement Share and increased cap on Partner’s maximum aggregate revenue share

Governance Closed Proposals
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CIP-75: Partner Incentive Alignment - Partner Fee, Partner Price Improvement Share and Increased Cap on Partner’s Maximum Aggregate Revenue Share.

title: Partner Incentive Alignment - Partner Fee, Partner Price Improvement Share and increased cap on Partner’s maximum aggregate revenue share.
author: @Kowrigan
status: Voting
created: 2025-11-11

Simple Summary

This CIP aims at amending CIP-61 by (i) introducing a Partner Share of the Price Improvement on attributed orders, (ii) allowing partners to combine the Partner Fee and the Partner Share of the Price Improvement, and (iii) raising the cap of the Partner maximum aggregate revenue share from its current 1% to 5%. Other provisions of CIP-61 remain unchanged, and (iv) increase the default revenue share on volume based partner fees for the benefit of the partners from 50/50 to 25/75.

Motivation

This amendment aligns incentives by granting integrators a direct, capped share of the Price Improvement mirroring the DAO Price Improvement Share and greater flexibility to monetise their flows by increasing the Partner’s maximum aggregate revenue share and explicitly allowing them to combine their share of Price Improvement and the app-level volume based Partner Fee.

While the philosophy of protecting users by implementing a cap above which the partner is prevented from exploiting users by charging a 100% volume fee remains a guiding principle, this CIP is driven by recent discussions with potential integrators, which indicate that there is a strong interest in multiplying their revenue streams by monetising their integration of CoW Protocol. The absence of share of the price improvement as well as the 1% cap has been a blocker to signing integration deals with partners capable of driving large volumes to CoW Protocol, and a higher cap enables sustainable, value-added business models without altering Price Improvement math or protocol-level fees.

Specification

1. Price Improvement allocation on partner-attributed orders

In certain circumstances and at the discretion of the Core Team certain partners are entitled to a share of the price improvement. In this event the price improvement allocation is computed the following way:

  1. Step A - CoW DAO Price Improvement Share: 50% (capped to 1% of nominal)
  2. Step B - User share: 1%
  3. Step C - Partner Price Improvement Share: 49% (capped to 1% of nominal - CoW DAO share)
  4. Step D - Remainder: accrue to the user.

CoW DAO reserves the right to apply service fees that will be deducted from the Partner Price Improvement Share.

2. Combining volume based Partner Fees and Partner Price Improvement Share

For these partners that are entitled to a share of the price improvement, this CIP authorises such partners to combine the revenues made from the Partner Fee and from the Price Improvement at the conditions detailed in the section 3 below.

3. Partner’s maximum aggregate revenue share increased from 1% to 5%

Partners may set a Partner Fee up to 500 bips on attributed orders. The Partner keeps the ability to decide on the fee applied on attributed orders from 0 to 100 bps.

In the event that a Partner is (a) implementing a volume based Partner Fee, (b) entitled to a share of the price improvement, and (c) the executed transaction effectively produces a price improvement the volume based Partner Fee will have precedence over the Partner Price Improvement. In other words, in the event the volume based Partner Fee reaches the cap of X% defined above, the Partner will not be entitled to receive the Partner Price Improvement Share.

4. Modification of default Revenue Share on volume based Partner Fees from 50/50 to 25/75

CIP-61 implemented a default revenue share on volume based partner fee where the DAO would collect 50% of such partner fees and remit the remaining 5O% to the Partner for Partner’s implementing standard integration.

This CIP changes the default revenue share to: 25% to the DAO and 75% to the Partner. The Core Team reserves the right to negotiate different revenue share based on tailored agreements.

For the avoidance of doubt this revenue share does not apply to Price Improvement Shares.

Experimentation Mandate

Additionally from 1 December 2025, and for a period of 6 months experimentation on fees and monetisation may continue as follows:

Examples:

  • Testing different models of Price Improvement Share
  • Testing staggered fees, fee tiers, or incentives for holding COW tokens.
  • Introducing fees or price-improvement-sharing to new order types that may be added (e.g. stop loss orders)
  • Other fee, revenue- or price-improvement sharing mechanisms that may make sense to experiment with, whilst keeping documentation requirements and time limits.

Transaction Data

No on-chain actions are required with the successful passing of this proposal.

2

Thanks for the proposal.

Am I correct in assuming that solvers aren’t affected by this change?
Or will the DAO and solvers also see a reduction in income when their share of revenue is reduced in favor of Partners?

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3

Hi @cp0x, thank you for your message.

Yes, you are correct. Solvers are not negatively affected by this change. The revenue for partners is generated entirely from the trading activity on the partner’s interface, specifically:

  • Partner Price Improvement Share: This portion is taken from the users on the partner’s interface. Instead of the user receiving 100% of the surplus a portion of those “savings” is shared with the partner.
  • Partner Fee: This is derived from the volume-based fee that the partner chooses to implement on their own interface. It is an explicit fee applied to the trade volume by the partner

This updated incentive model for partners to integrate CoW Swap should attract more partners and help driving volumes up.

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