Grant Application: Run a Covariance Cow Swap widget integration campaign

CoW Grants Program Funded Grants
1

Author:

Lior Goldenberg, Founder - Covariance

Contact@covariance.network

About You:
Hey everyone, Lior here! A builder, investor and super connector. Founder at Covariance.network today, CFO and corporate strategy in previous life. I fell in love with web3 and fell into the DAO rabbit hole in 2019 with DAOstack, Hacked and won 1st place at Ocean Data Economy Challenge with DataDAO, Evolved into D2D growth contributor and BD lead during the DeFi summer

Later to join Collider Ventures (investor in Cow Swap) as Head of Platform, leading post investment portfolio support, where I worked with 20+ portfolio companies on value creation and BD.

Now building Covariance, where we are focused on solving for how to scale value add & unlock all those opportunities not materialize due to gap in coordination

Grant Category:

Integrations and protocol order flow

Grant Description:

This is a proposal to run a Covariance Go to Network campaign to support CoW Swap’s goal to drive integration of the recently released CoW Swap widget

Background about Covariance:

  1. We help projects solve well defined and measurable problems, by empowering contributors from varied networks to collaborate and help achieve those goals.

  2. Projects define their KPI’s, allocate rewards, and only pay when their KPI’s are met.

  3. Covariance runs in seasons, where we curate a cohort of BD & sales contributors with a diverse background across web3. The contributors get a chance to help projects, and get rewarded if they were able to create value

  4. We work with the project to:

    1. Align on needs,
    2. Define the KPIs,
    3. Agree on rewards
    4. Screen and onboard vetted contributors
    5. Qualifying the opportunities
    6. Deliver the results

  5. Covariance becomes a supercharged, focused & result oriented sales organization for Cow Swap, taking all the hassle out of the core team limited capacity, while being a multiplier to the organic Cow Swap DAO and core team outreach.

  6. Cow Swap receive invaluable feedback from multiple people, segments in the markets and applications type that can be used to better improve it’s product and future GTM efforts.

  7. Covariance becomes a partner with potentially expanding the engagement to other GTM efforts.

Website:
Covariance.network

CoW Swap Goals

Onboard integration partners that could expand CoW Swap’s user base outreach and generate increased swap volume into CoW protocol.

KPIs:

20 dapps and web apps integrating CoW Swap widget.

Framework:

Contributors will propose potential leads via a submission form to be marked as Qualified. (done on the covariance app).
CoW Swap team will pre-approve which opportunities are considered as qualified leads

Qualified lead to be considered for rewards:

In order to avoid spam and gaming the system by integrating into “fake” website", we will introduce a threhold for what is considered a qualified integration:

Semrush authority score + minimum organic traffic - A minimum average organic traffic over period of the previous 6 months above 1,000 visitors + authority score above 20

Eligible contributors are those who submitted qualified leads who complete integration of the widget.

The Cow committee will have a veto right on rewarding qualified leads in case of suspicious integration

Funding Request: - Campaign Rewards pool - Paid for success:

CoW Swap will allocate a total of $60K USD worth of tokens into a reward pool that will be distributed to eligible contributors who were able to help achieve the above mentioned KPI’s.

The reward pool comprise of 50% $COW tokens and %50 xDAI

The main $50K reward pool will be distributed based on the following 2 metrics:

  1. Integration reward (10%) - first 10 eligible integrations will make the contributor eligible for a relative portion of a $5000 rewards pool (i.e - $500 / integration)
  2. Volume based reward - contributors will get rewarded based on the actual total trade volume routed via the widget on a period of 3 month after the integration they have helped create:
    1. $50K-500K (20%)
    2. $500K-$1M (20%)
    3. $1M-$10M (20%)
    4. $10M+ (30%)

An additional $10K kicker:

  1. Global kicker - if total volume resulted from the campaign has been exceeding $30M in aggregated trading volume over the period of 3 months after the integrations, CoW Swap will allocate an additional $10,000 bounty to be distributed pro-rata to the top 3 volume contributors.

Total reward per a single contributor is capped at $20K worth of rewards

A simulation of the way rewards are calculated can be found [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_nd9K03_UUVNlbAfSfYmSv4duzf6TOScpQTYQtOsBhQ/edit#gid=760207505)

Campaign length:

The campaign will last between 4-8 weeks and will enable contributors to submit leads and opportunities that support the completion of the above mentioned KPI’s

The submissions will be reviewed on an ongoing basis to confirm which leads are considered qualified (to avoid spam and misuse of the reward pool for irrelevant integrations)

Campaign resolution:

  • Upon conclusion of the campaign, a committee (combined of Covariance + CoW Swap members) will resolve the submissions and determine which contributions are eligible for rewards.
  • Reward tokens will be vested over a period of 1 year from time of campaign conclusion.
  • If not all goals met, the rewards will be allocated pro-rata to the portion unlocked
  • Covariance will get 20% share of the distributed rewards
  • $COW price for reward distribution will be decided on 90 days weighted average based on coingecko close price (https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/cow-protocol/historical_data#panel)

Service Fee

To help remove as much burden from the Cow internal team, a service fee of $5000 xDAI which will be paid for Covariance to manage the entire campaign. Service fee will be paid in 2 installments:

Part 1 - $2500 paid upfront

Part 2 - $2500 paid upon reaching a milestone of minimum 3 integrations achieved via the campaign.

The service includes:

  1. Setting up the campaign, define targets and iterate based on feedback provided to maximize campaign success and value-for-money on the grant
  2. Establish the data room with all info required for any contributor to help promote the widget, including education about the unique value proposition of Cow Swap, and the widget itself.
  3. Hold a live education sessions with the participants to equip them with best understanding of the product.
  4. On going execution - be the focal point during the campaign for inbound queries from the network of contributors
  5. Campaign resolution and handling of reward distribution logistics - Covariance will provide Cow Swap team the information needed to distribute reward to eligible contributors.

Post campaign reward program:

An existing partner reward program exists in place to motivate partners to funnel volumes via CoW Swap. This program is already in place and serve as a complementary solution to the Covariance campaign which is mostly focused on generating top of the funnel lead and opportunities generation.

Gnosis Chain Address (to receive the grant):

The total payment and recipient list and address will be provided upon campaign conclusion.

For the part Covariance receive:

gno:0x094cA0657B2eB4BF8DAEbFADC40bD79A4f4d826E

Other Information:

Additional Links about Covariance will be added in comments

Referral:

I’ve been sharing the idea and develop this proposal discussing with @middleway.eth, who had encouraged me to post this here.

Terms and Conditions:

(links removed due to link limitation - will be added on the formal proposal)

By submitting this grant application, I acknowledge and agree to be bound by the

CoW DAO Participation Agreement
CoW Grant Terms and Conditions

5 Likes
2

Cool initiative Lior!

Would like to clarify that:
“Total reward per a single contributor is capped at $20K worth of rewards” and “Covariance will get 20% share of the distributed rewards”, together implies that net rewards to a project is capped at $16K?

Would just be mindful that based on the past volume-based grants, which rewards US$10M volume with 60k COW (at current market price is around US$15k).

With the way that the payout mechanics in this proposal is designed, a project generating less than US$10M can potentially hit the max cap. Without changing the payout mechanics, I would recommend to consider lowering the max cap Total Reward, to be more at least on par with existing volume-based grants.

Cheers!

1 Like
3

Thanks for the feedback @cmalee ! good clarification - If I understand the past volume-based grants right, these are 2 separate rewards pool:

Those reward the dapp to funnel volumes via cowswap ,
Here we are giving incentives for contributors that participate in the campaign to drive new widget integrations (and later volume) - and the reward goes to the contributor

The idea was to include a volume based component, so contributors are motivated to help with driving quality integration that also have potential to reach volumes (which is what we want to eventually achieve)

So the thinking is that those contributors, are also motivated to help post-integration to refer trade volume to those dapps cause they have this additional reward upside potential.

In regards to the volume, COW prices are fluctuating so very hard to fix the USD value. if you think it’s important, we can propose a fixed amount of COW tokens to be allocated and then mention token quantity rather than USD value. (but then add another variable than can either help/harm the attractiveness of the campaign)

Hope this is clarifies and helpful!