Amount of COW Tokens intended for Self-Delegation: 603k vCOW
Expertise and Experience:
Relevant Expertise: karpatkey is a DeFi-native organisation specialising in professional DAO finance through industry-leading research and tooling since 2020. We’ve been working with GnosisDAO, Balancer, ENS, AAVE and Lido on financial planning, operations, and strategy, diversifying their treasuries into sustainable portfolios of DeFi investments designed to support DAOs in executing their missions.
Previous Involvement in the CoW Ecosystem: Under CIP-19 , karpatkey created, trained, supported, and audited a Core Treasury Team within CoW DAO that works jointly with us to develop CoW DAO’s treasury, allowing CowSwap to efficiently provide its own liquidity, fund its operations, development, and evolution while optimising yield for idle funds. Besides that, we are an active governance member within CoWDAO.
Motivation:
We’ve been advocates of delegated voting in DAO governance as a viable solution to improve the legitimacy, inclusivity, and effectiveness of decision-making processes. However, the efficacy of this system is highly dependent on having domain experts actively involved as delegates. It fosters a symbiotic relationship between all stakeholders, optimising the quality of collective decisions and reinforcing the democratic underpinnings of DAOs.karpatkey’s governance team taps our network of engineers, DeFi strategists, data/financial/quant analysts, and accountants for subject matter expertise.
As DAO treasury developers and contributors to some of the most reputable DeFi protocols in our industry, we believe that our team has the knowledge, trust, and alignment to meaningfully contribute to CoWDAO’s growth moving forward. Check out our values to understand a bit more about our guiding and decision-making principles. We differentiate ourselves by being a hands-on delegate, actively leveraging our unique position in assembling a DeFi block of DAOs with similar values.
Conflict of Interest:
We currently work with CoWDAO’s Core Treasury Team and, if any conflict of interest regarding this arises, we will communicate in advance.
Hi there - awesome, thank you for posting your introduction. I saw you’ve included a Snapshot statement, wonderful!
If you’d like to be considered a “recognized” delegate, a recognition awarded by a Grants committee member, would you please link your application in this thread with a statement along the lines of “We’d love for your review to be considered a recognized delegate and commit to active participation in CoW DAO’s governance”
Next steps on our end would be more publicity around the program, which we’re aiming for in January. Excited to take CoW DAO’s governance to the next level!
Reasoning: We support CIP-72 as it meaningfully strengthens the alignment between quoting and execution behaviour, addressing a growing misalignment that has led to inefficiencies and potential exploitation of the quote rewards mechanism. By conditioning quote rewards on the solver’s willingness and ability to match their quotes during execution, the proposal discourages strategic overbidding. It encourages more accurate pricing—improving user outcomes and protocol integrity.
Additionally, the modest increase in quote reward caps on select chains offers a pragmatic balance: offsetting edge cases where honest quotes may go unrewarded due to market shifts, without unduly incentivising toxic or circular trading behaviour.
Reasoning: We support CIP-73 as it provides a clear and prudent framework for CoW Foundation to execute a potential sale of MEV Blocker on behalf of the DAO.
MEV Blocker has been a successful initiative aligned with CoW DAO’s mission, but with the team’s focus returning to CoW Protocol and CoW Swap, authorising the Foundation to explore a sale at fair market terms is a logical step. It enhances strategic focus, simplifies operations, and converts a non-core asset into productive treasury resources that can fund CoW’s main roadmap.
The proposed guardrails and reporting requirements strike a good balance between flexibility and transparency.
Vote: For
Reasoning: The move from a fixed solver reward cap to a dynamic one tied to actual protocol fee generation is a clear improvement. It fixes the current situation where solver upside is artificially capped on high-value batches and the protocol sometimes subsidises solver rewards on low-fee batches — a misalignment that is especially visible on L2s. The small 2bps unconditional fee is reasonable, preserves CoW’s execution advantage over other venues, and filters out toxic flows that aren’t additive to the protocol.
This is a simple and data-backed mechanism improvement that makes the model more sustainable, improves incentive alignment, and streamlines new chain deployments going forward.
