Grant Proposal: CoW <> DeFunds Integration

CoW Grants Program Rejected Grants
1

CoW Protocol <> DeFunds Integration

Grant Title:
CoW Protocol <> DeFunds Integration.
DeFunds is a social investment platform that facilitates profit sharing between professional traders and users - DeFi investors

Author:
Igor Shepelev igor@defunds.co
LinkedIn

Rustam Abdullin rustam@defunds.co
LinkedIn

About You:
Igor and Rustam have been working on DeFunds part time since Oct 2021. Our developers are working on DeFunds full-time since Oct 2021. Our sister company https://quanthill.ae/ has ~90M AuM and 100 investors:

  • 8 years trading (6 years profitable)
  • AuM increased 14 times within 5 years

Development of classic trading quant strategies, developer/author of algorithmic trend strategy Q-Ant. Algorithmic trend-following trading of crypto futures with over 70% average annualized return since 2018.

Crypto asset management and venture investments with an institutional level of service quality.

Rustam was a co-founder of The Sandbox NFT project. Assembled and managed a team of 20 people (game developers, designers, web3 developer, community manager, moderators, content makers). Built strategic partnerships with Metaverse and NFT projects (The Sandbox Premium Partnership and related projects).

More than 14 years in Cyber Security and Project Management in US and international FinTech companies. Co-founder of three projects (Digital ID with zero knowledge data sharing in Starknet L2 ecosystem, successful The Sandbox NFT project).

Software Engineering team which have the technical expertise to deliver the grant milestones.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn
LinkedIn

Additional Links:
https://defunds.co
Datasheet
https://twitter.com/defunds_co
MVP

Grant Category:

  • CoWmunity growth
  • Integrations and protocol order flow

Grant Description:
We would like to provide our Managers and Investors with lowest price for their trade, as well as protection from MEV.

The goal of this engagement is to define clear use cases, statement of work, user stories and integration PoC: DeFunds + CoW.

Grant Goals and impact:

DeFunds goals is to establish transparent and safe interaction between Investor and Manager, non-custodial crypto-investment platform for trading core crypto assets and DeFi tokens.

We are ready to bring new customers and professional Asset Managers to CoW protocol, by integrating it into our dApp.

Milestones:

Milestone #1. Prepare use cases, statement of work and user stories for our development team on CoW + DeFunds integration
Milestone #2. Prepare PoC and MVP CoW smartcontracts / backend
Milestone #3. Prepare technical and marketing materials on CoW features within DeFunds application. Documentation and code examples that help our developers and technology partners

Grant Timeline:

  • Milestone #1 - 2 weeks
  • Milestone #2 - 2 weeks
  • Milestone #3 - 1 weeks
    All of the above milestones should be completed by the end of January 2023

Funding Request:
$6,000, half paid up-front (for Milestone #1) and half paid once Milestones #2 and #3 are done.

Budget Breakdown:

  • $3k (50% of total): Milestone #1
  • $2k (33% of total): Milestone #2
  • $1k (17% of total): Milestone #3

Gnosis Chain Address (to receive the grant):
If okay, I’d prefer not putting this on a public forum, but would be happy to share with any members of the CoW team

Other Information:
We can bring a new experience of interaction between Asset Manager and Investor into the crypto, which has been tested for decades and is the standard in classic Hedge Funds, with the help of smart contracts and blockchain. We managed to take the age-old experience of the classic market and pack the structure and logic of work into DeFunds.

We plan to bring a new standard for asset management to DeFi. DeFunds goals is to establish transparent and safe interaction between Investor and Manager, non-custodial crypto-investment platform for trading core crypto assets and DeFi tokens.

Current status of the project:

  • Smart contract security audit (RFP / scoping stage)
  • MVP deployment to mainnet https://app.defunds.co/
  • Web-site development https://defunds.co
  • Partnership building with Managers
  • Fundraising/grants/accelerator programs

Referral:
No

Terms and conditions:
Include this line in your grant application:

By applying for this grant, I agree to be bound by the CowDAO Participation Agreement and the COWDAO Grant Terms and Conditions.

1 Like
2

Hi @IgorShepelev

I find your proposal interesting especially in the context of CoW Protocol being suitable to empower non-custodial asset management.
I have few followup questions:

  • after the grant milestones are complete, would CoW Protocol be fully integrated into Defunds and available to managers for facilitating their ERC20 trading?
  • Together with with Gnosis Safe and Zodiac, we’re exploring building toolkit for non custodial secure treasury management: description of the product
  • I think it would be interesting to work with your managers to adopt this type of security model for funds management.
3

after the grant milestones are complete, would CoW Protocol be fully integrated into Defunds and available to managers for facilitating their ERC20 trading?

Yes, we will add CoW protocol support to our MVP and provide managers with appropriate technical description.

  • Together with with Gnosis Safe and Zodiac, we’re exploring building toolkit for non custodial secure treasury management: description of the product
  • I think it would be interesting to work with your managers to adopt this type of security model for funds management.

We are building our own key management and whitelist features. Let us include this solution to the scope of the Grant proposal, we will compare toolkit features with our business and security requirements. We will try to pilot (PoC) it and provide you with our feedback.

4

Hey @middleway.eth

As per our conversation, we discussed Grant Protoposal within our team one more time and have summarised the next steps:

DeFunds.co goal is to provide our investors/manager with best and predictable trade prices and protect them from blockchain attacks which may decrease overall profit of appropriate strategy.

Within current Grant Proposal DeFunds.co team would like to pilot the following CoW features:

  • Off-chain order submission
  • Batch trades processing. As Protocol states that before finding the best price for a trade from available on-chain liquidity, CoW Protocol first seeks a coincidence of wants within the existing batch to offer an even better price than any pool can
  • Create a dedicated CoW whitelist, with all available CoW assets will be presented
  • Advanced analytics through querying the Cow Subgraph and Dune reports

In addition to that we would like to assess Treasury manager toolkit - a special treasury management tool that allows DAOs to nominate a “treasury manager” and limit his ability to only trade specific allowed tokens on CoW Swap.

Current DeFunds.co approach does not assume Fund management/investments though Gnosis Safe [with enhanced Zodiac based security features], and appropriate security controls will be implemented on DeFunds.co side, such as whitelist of tokens to be traded by the DeFunds Fund manager. But we would like to access and prepare the list of use cases on DeFunds.co <> Treasury manager toolkit integration.

Upcoming tasks:

  • Formalize use cases CoW <> DeFunds.co
  • Statement of work and user stories for our development team on CoW + DeFunds integration
  • Go language based backend modules to establish off-chain order submission:
    • the contract allowance manager
    • limit sell/buy orders off-chain at any time by simply signing a message
  • Prepare use cases for DeFunds.co <> Treasury manager toolkit integration
1 Like
5

Thanks @IgorShepelev for the summary.
I really believe that CoW Protocol is a perfect match for on-chain treasury management use case.

Looking forward to learn more about the use cases that comes out of those tasks.
Alternatively, we can consider focusing on the use case you deem as “lowest hanging fruit” and aim at an initial grant for it.
Then we can assess follow up use cases based on it?

6

Yes, we are on early stage (MVP) of our project development, thereby we can be flexible here. I think “lowest hanging fruit” will be go module for CoW API, and use cases documentation for sure.

7

Not sure what you mean by “go module”…
There’s this golang client in final development stages

8

Thanks for the link, I found just js SDK in your official docs. Getting Started with the SDK - CoW Protocol

Our devs team confirmed that they would like to test this goland SDK:

  • Fee Mechanism
  • Price Estimation
  • Sign and Post orders
  • Order cancellation
    and integrate it with our backend and front
9

Great!
Just mentioning that it is still not fully completed and tested
@itsahedge is actively working on it and can elaborate on the current state of the code

10

oki, thanks for the introduction!

re: grant funding
Ok with you to start with half-paid upfront terms?

Funding Request:
$6,000, half paid up-front (for Milestone #1) and half paid once Milestones #2 and #3 are done.
11

Would love to get feedback from other committee members as well.
For my perspective, I’m still missing a more detailed milestones with deliverables.
With current description of the grant in the original post, it is still not clear what are the bottom line deliverables and the benefit they add for CoW Swap.

12

ok, let us prioritize CoW related tasks in our backlog to prepare better milestones with deliverables.

1 Like
13

I agree with @middleway.eth.
@IgorShepelev please provide a clear explanation on how this proposal provides benefit to the Cow Protocol, and a breakdown of deliverables over time.

14

I have been working on the go SDK and should be available to use in the very near future.

2 Likes
15

Just wanted to pop in and let you guys know the Go client is now complete!

https://github.com/itsahedge/go-cowswap

https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/itsahedge/go-cowswap

2 Likes