Grant application - DeFi Interface

CoW Grants Program Funded Grants
1

Grant Title:

CowSwap Hook DeFi interface

Authors:

@octavionotpunk
@tche

About You:

Octave: Valha co-founder. Actuary, Former TradFi guy (catastrophe modelling and ILS analyst at AXA IM). Started Valha in September 2022.
Thomas: Valha co-founder. In crypto since 2020 and worked on several POCs (including a transaction simulator chrome extension called Ratl and a Yield Aggregator Dashboard called CompAPY) before working full time on Valha since September 2022.

Additional Links:

Valha widget showcase

Grant Category:

User interface and user experience (UI/UX)

Grant Description:

Valha is developing APIs and smart contract to simplify the integration of DeFi protocols in any interface.
We think that CoWSwap Hooks have the potential to allow users to access DeFi in a simpler way by bundling complex transactions together.

We offer to help develop a web interface (the ā€œInterfaceā€ ) to allows users to access yield opportunities in any DeFi vertical (staking, lending, yield aggregators, rwa) in one centralized place.

Motivation:

We think that developing an Interface is needed for three major reasons:

  • User stickiness: It is hard to capture long-term attention from DeFi users. There is no platform offering an extensive and aggregated experience for DeFi users on both analytics and interactions.
  • Better UX for users: Thanks to CoW Hooks combined with Valha API, we can perform multiple actions (zap-ins, zap-outs, position rebalancing, claim multiple rewards, claim and swap) in only 1 transaction.
  • Awareness of Hooks capabilities: With this Interface, we want to showcase the major UX improvement that Hooks offer and that the technology is already safe and available for all to build on top.

Grant Goals and Impact:

The Interface north-star metrics is volume amount in $.

Lidoā€™s (resp. Aave V2) OKX integration represents an annualised volume of $50M (resp. $80M). OKX DEX annual volume is $1.8B. Aave and Lido integrations stands for 7% of OKX DEX volume.

Given that Cowswap generates $12B volume per year, we can expect $840M (=7%*12B) yearly volume for all DeFi (as Lido and Aave v2 approximately accounts for 33% of total DeFi TVL).

Based on OKX trend, we think we can reach:

  • 6 weeks after validation: $10M generated: 10% of theoretical OKX volume (10*(52/6) / 840)
  • 12 weeks after validation: $50M generated: 26% of theoretical OKX volume (50*(52/12) / 840)
  • 24 weeks after validation: $300M generated: 78% of theoretical OKX volume (300*(52/24) / 840)

Milestones:

As Hooks are only live on mainnet yet, we should focus on a curated list of DeFi vertical at first: liquid staking, overcollaterized lending and bridge liquidity.

  • Milestone 1. v0 Interface with the 3 main liquid staking protocols, 3 lending protocols (Aave, Compound, Flux Finance) and 2 Bridge protocols (Stargate, Across) live.
    Interactions features: zap-in, zap-out Analytics features: 7d_apr, 30d_apr, lifetime-rewards, user-balance.
    ETA: 4 weeks after proposal validation
  • Milestone 2. 10 new protocols among liquid staking, lending, bridges and yield aggregators.
    ETA: 6 weeks after proposal validation
  • Milestone 3: Add claim and swap in one-click to claim rewards in the token of your choice.
    ETA: 8 weeks after proposal validation.

Afterwards: Protocols added weekly based on user demands and CoWSwap readiness to open new chains.

Funding Request:

We are requesting funding of $3,000 and a maximum of 420,000 COW tokens for successful completion and deployment of the Interface.

We ask for $2,000 on the completion of Milestone 1 (4 weeks after the validation of the proposal) and $1,000 upon Milestone 2 & 3 (8 weeks after validation proposal).

We also request to be included for the Volume-based Partner Reward Program.

Other support

In order to attract users, we would need some support on:

  • Co-marketing (through articles, podcasts). We should raise awareness about the Hooks possibilities and how we leverage them through the Interface.

Budget Breakdown:

The funds will cover labor costs and related development expenses.

Gnosis Chain Address (to receive the grant):

gno:0x3191942677ae623B0465f029F01e7b242FAC000d

Terms and Conditions:

By submitting this grant application, I acknowledge and agree to be bound by the CoW DAO Participation Agreement and the CoW Grant Terms and Conditions.

Happy to collect your feedbacks and answer your technical and non-technical questions regarding what we look to achieve with the ā€˜Interfaceā€™.

Appendix:

Why sometimes is better to stake directly rather than swapping?

  1. Access to insightful analytics that you do not get on Swap interface: lifetime_rewards, current and historical APY.
  2. Less/No slippage: no need to maintain liquidity pools to ensure parity on primary markets
  3. Similar to lower gas fees

ā†’ It is possible to offer an optimisation route in the Interface to select swap/direct deposit depending on secondary vs. primary total action cost.

Design Ideas:

Screenshots link

2

Hi! Thanks for your grant proposal. This looks great!

A couple of nits around the language to ensure that there is no ambiguity.

In this section I am assuming that the 420K COW tokens is related to the Volume-based Partner Reward Program from CoWDAO Grants. If this is correct, I would change the wording to remove the explicit mention of the 420K COW Tokens, and make the statement of requesting $3K broken up as you already have ($2K after completion of Milestone 1, and $1K after completion of Milestones 2 and 3) and your request to be included for the Volume-based Partner Reward Program.

Iā€™d also slightly modify the ā€œMilestonesā€ section, that when you give the list, break these down as indexed milestones (like I did in the previous paragraph), and just put an ETA after them. This way we can be clear about which milestones that we are discussing and the milestones themselves donā€™t have conditions within :smiley:

Iā€™m very keen to see this go into action and am signalling my support, nits above withstanding.

Additionally, with regards to this, Iā€™d strongly encourage the technical team to be present in #tech-talk on the CoW Protocol discord so that technical questions can be answered in a more timely fashion, and this technical knowledge can be made available for others to build from!

2 Likes
3

Hi @mfw78,

Thank you for your kind words and suggestions.

I am editing the proposal to adjust it according to your suggestions.
We are both here in the CoW Swap Discord (octavionotpunk, tcheee42) and are available to answer any of your technical questions.

1 Like
4

The proposal is now live on Snapshot :smiley: : Snapshot

1 Like
5

Hey everyone,

To keep you inform about the platform, we have made tremendous progress in the last 5 weeks.

Kook is available here, youā€™re free to give your feedbacks on our telegram channel and soon directly on cowswap discord.

To develop specifically about our works, here is the memo of last weeks:

  1. By october 19th:
  • We have integrated first protocols on the Kook interface being Maker sDAI, Agave and Lido protocols. Anyone can zap into those pools using cowswap hooks in the background.
  1. By october 26th (Milestone 1 completion)
  • Based on first users feedbacks: We have created a comparison page to improve protocol discovery for users by filtering and sorting yield opportunities by categories
  • The current protocols live include: Liquid staking (Lido, Rocketpool, Coinbase LS, Binance LS, Swell, Ankr, Frax) Lending( Aave,Compound,Spark, Agave), Bridge (Stargate), RWA(Flux, Maker, Angle)
  1. By november 3rd (Milestone 2 completion)
  • Weā€™ve integrated new protocols including Across for Bridges LP. Sommelier & Instadapp for Yield and Frax sFrax for RWA.
  • We also incorporated more context to users when using zap with Cowswap hook: we open a modal describing every steps of the investment and explaining the underlying risk of Cowswap hooks.
  • Weā€™ll keep adding up protocols on Gnosis and Ethereum mainnet given users feedbacks
  • We open a Positions dashboard view to check your holdings for a specific wallet
  • We added more information to explain yield source, protocol description and associated risks to this specific investment (IL, Bad debt, Slashing etc.)

We are now excitingly asking to any interested tester to experiment with Kook, starting on Gnosis protocols.
Kook interface is a priority for us in the coming months, so any features, protocols that you want could be made available rapidly.

Given the completion of Milestone 1 and 2, we are ready to get the $3,000 (2,000+1,000) agreed upon with the Grant application process.

1 Like
6

Hi, for assessment of the milestones, we require github repository links to associated code, as well as demonstration with CoW hooks. For more immediate / non-forum discussion, itā€™d be helpful to discuss in #tech-talk on the Discord. :+1:

3 Likes
7

Please find attached Cow Hooks demonstration:

We follow in the coming days/weeks with FE available too.

We commented a bit the code but we would be happy to get more into details if you have any question. We are aware of some limitations:

  • Using the hooks with interaction slippage might be dangerous if the share_price is not accurate enough and end up in funds being lock on the relayer. That is why we let the choice in the front-end for the user to use it or not and block transactions that are too important for now. It wonā€™t be an issue in phase 2 awe we are going to deploy our own contracts as relayers to avoid this issue.
  • We can not use the hooks for redeem/claim actions as we can not take the risk of making the user approve a contract where anybody can execute arbitrary call data without having all the actions made in the same transaction. Therefore, we can only offer to do the swap and the action one after the other in a simpler UX for now.