R SDK for CoW Protocol

CoW Grants Program
1

Grant Title: R SDK for CoW Protocol, bringing Quantitative Finance & DeFi Together

Author: Saw Simeon
GitHub: (sawsimeon)

About You

Experienced R Developer in Finance and Trading Tools. Creator and maintainer of igfetchr, an officially published CRAN package for retrieving, trading and analyzing live and historical forex market data from the IG Market igfetchr.

This package showcases deep expertise in building production-ready R packages: API integration, secure authentication, trade execution, rate-limit handling, data transformation into tibbles, comprehensive testing, and successful CRAN submission and approval. These exact skills transfer directly to building a robust and user-friendly R SDK for CoW Protocol.

Grant Category

Protocol Order Flow / Developer Tools

Grant Description

Problem

R is the dominant language among quantitative analysts, statisticians, hedge funds, university researchers, and data-science teams in both traditional finance and crypto. Many quants already use R for backtesting, risk modeling, statistical arbitrage, and on-chain analytics. Despite this, CoW Protocol currently lacks any native tooling for the R ecosystem, preventing a large segment of traders and researchers from easily integrating CoW’s superior batch auction settlement and MEV protection into their workflows.

Solution

This grant will fund the development and long-term maintenance of an official CoW Protocol R SDK (working title: cowr), fully tailored to the needs of quantitative DeFi users.

Grant Goals and Impact

  • Dramatically increase CoW Protocol adoption among quantitative traders, researchers, and academic institutions.
  • Enable seamless integration of CoW Protocol into existing R-based trading, research, and risk-management pipelines.
  • Bring an entirely new demographic of high-value users (statisticians, quants, university labs) into the CoW community.

Milestones

Phase One – Development & Public Release (12 weeks)

The R package cowr will provide:

  • Full querying of the CoW Protocol Subgraph (via GraphQL + httr2 → tidy data frames).
  • Creation, signing, and submission of limit and market orders to the CoW Protocol API.
  • Interaction with CoW Protocol settlement contracts (using direct JSON-RPC wrappers).
  • Order metadata encoding and optional IPFS pinning through R.
  • Utilities for fetching, decoding, and analyzing on-chain settlement and order-book data.
  • Comprehensive unit and integration tests using testthat for API mocking.
  • Full documentation with roxygen2, pkgdown site, and extensive vignettes.
  • Feature parity with:
    • a. cowprotocol/cow-sdk
    • b. cowprotocol/contracts (hashing utilities)
    • c. cowprotocol/app-data
  • Submission, approval, and publication on CRAN (the official R package repository, equivalent to PyPI for Python).
  • A dedicated cowr.github.io documentation and tutorial portal for onboarding R users into CoW Protocol.

The project repository will be hosted under the @cowdao-grants organization as cow-r.

Phase Two – Maintenance & Commun@cowdao-grantsty Support

  • Active maintenance, bug fixes, and feature requests for 12 months after Phase 1 completion.
  • Ongoing updates to track new CoW Protocol features and API changes.
  • Community support via GitHub Issues, Discord, and forum assistance for R users.

Grant Timeline

  • Phase One: 12 weeks from grant approval
  • Phase Two: 12 months of maintenance following Phase 1 completion

Funding Request

$8,500 USD for Phase One (development, testing, CRAN submission, documentation, and tutorials).

Funding will be used exclusively for development labor and related costs. Final distribution (if multiple contributors emerge) will be determined by the Grants Committee.

Once the R SDK reaches full functionality and is live on CRAN, all orders submitted through cowr will become eligible for the CoW Protocol Volume Grants Program. Any resulting volume rewards will be distributed to the original developer(s) and future maintainers according to the ratio determined solely by the Grants Committee.

Budget Breakdown

  • $8,500 – Development, testing, CRAN submission, pkgdown + GitHub.io tutorial site
  • Volume Grants Program eligibility (future)

Payment Information

Gnosis Chain Address for Grant Payment:
0xb1491e8eeec22f3ce1b8ea54f63c0646bf2b60d0

Referral

N/A

Terms and Conditions

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

2

Thanks @sawsimeon we appreciate you submitting this proposal.

After discussing with the council, we won’t be moving forward with an R SDK at this time. DeFi tooling has largely consolidated around Python, TypeScript, and Rust, and our existing SDKs in those languages cover the bulk of the developer demand we are seeing. Each additional SDK also adds an ongoing maintenance burden that we need to weigh against expected usage and potential volume.

That said, if you decide to build this as a community project, we’d be happy to provide guidance and could revisit grant support if it gains traction.

Appreciate you thinking of CoW Protocol.

3

Thanks for the quick feedback and for taking the time to review the proposal. I really appreciate it.

Totally understand the prioritization around Python/TypeScript/Rust and the ongoing maintenance burden. It makes complete sense given the current developer demand and ecosystem focus. I am still very excited about bringing CoW Protocol to the R economic, research, and academic community, so I will go ahead and start building cowr as an open-source community project in the coming weeks. I’ll host it under my own GitHub for now and keep the same high quality standards as my existing CRAN packages (full test coverage, pkgdown site, vignettes, and eventual CRAN submission). Once there’s a solid, working version with proper documentation and some early traction or feedback from R users in finance/crypto, I will ping you again and if it looks promising at that point, I would greatly appreciate a quick tweet from the official @CoWSwap account to help spread the word in the R community and a small grant for long-term maintenance to keep the package up-to-date with new CoW Protocol features.

Thanks again for the consideration!

Best regards,
Saw Simeon (@sawsimeon)

2 Likes
4

Love the approach of building it out with the R community first. If you want to come back once you’ve got traction, we’d be happy to revisit support options.

Best of luck!

2 Likes
5

Thank you so much and the open door. I will get to work on cowr, build it properly with the R community, and make it useful for quants and researchers. Once it’s live on GitHub + CRAN and we have some real usage, I will circle back.

Thanks again!

Best,
Saw Simeon

6

FYI, you may want to checkout feat: Add UTM Tracking for Developer Attribution by mfw78 · Pull Request #722 · cowprotocol/cow-sdk · GitHub to see how you can adapt this and integrate it into your SDK so volume can then be attributed.

1 Like
7

Huge thanks for this. This is awesome!

I have just gone through the PR in detail and I am adding the exact same UTM Tracking for Developer Attribution System into the cowr R package. This way every single trade executed through cowr will be fully attributed back to the package.

Thanks again for the tip.

Best,
Saw Simeon