Accidentally posted this proposal for the retro round here: CoW DAO's First Retro Funding Round - #9 by tantodefi
Full details regarding implementation, milestones and feasibility are available in the hackMD: Proposal for CoW DAO - HackMD
Happy to answer any questions related to our proposal or refine based on community feedback/needs 
An update on ccxt connector lib grant and a request for partial payment for work/milestones completed: Update on ccxt grant proposal - HackMD @sov @mfw78
Please post this to the forum as an external link can be changed post-facto and we don’t have records.
Proposal Reference: Snapshot Proposal
The CCXT integration grant is currently at a standstill. We have fully completed the required work on our end, but final delivery is blocked while we await the upstream CCXT library to review and merge our pull request:
PR #27319.
In light of the delay, which is outside our direct control, and due to concerns raised by our technical reviewer - we propose a 20% haircut on the original 15,000 xDAI milestone amount. This reduces the milestone payout to 12,000 xDAI.
We respectfully request a 50% partial payment of the adjusted milestone amount — 6,000 xDAI — as compensation for the work already completed and delivered.
We agree that the remaining 6,000 xDAI will be held and disbursed only upon successful merge of the PR.
We also understand that the 15k vCoW tokens associated with this grant will remain locked and will not be distributed or begin vesting until one year after the PR is successfully merged and the integration is complete.
Assuming the partial payment requested above is approved, and only as a last resort to further expedite the situation, we would be open to allocating a percentage of the remaining funds to the CCXT maintainers as an incentive for timely review and merge. The CCXT team would also directly benefit from the Partner Fee included in the integration, creating aligned incentives.
We remain fully committed to seeing this integration through to completion. We will:
This experience has highlighted the importance of early engagement with third-party maintainers for integrations that depend on external repositories. Involving the upstream team at the outset helps:
We applied this lesson in a subsequent proposal (Hummingbot Gateway connector), where early outreach to the third-party team would have mitigated similar risks:
CoW Forum Discussion – Hummingbot Proposal.
Moving forward, we will prioritize early coordination with any relevant third-party teams in similar integration proposals to minimize delays and maximize success rates.
We are enthusiastic about continuing to contribute to the CoW Protocol and DAO. Once this PR is merged, the integration will be complete and live. We look forward to proposing and delivering additional novel integrations that leverage the CoW SDK, drive new order flow, and increase protocol volume.
Thank you for your understanding and support. We are happy to discuss this proposal further or provide any additional details required.
All the best,
Tantodefi and Bhavya Gor
Hey,
Thanks for the update. In consideration with the Grants Council, and in light of the shortcomings that have been highlighted / identified, the Grants Council agrees that:
As such, these payments will be scheduled for February end-of-month payments.
mfw.
Thanks for the agreement!
As our responsibility, we will continue to ping the CCXT team to get this merged as soon as possible.
update on the current situation:
i have been pinging the official CCXT group on telegram and have been getting delayed responses each time - however on 21st March one of the core maintainers reached out via telegram personal message - demanding 40k as a flat fee to integrate and merge the branch
have asked him for updates in the same thread - the message has gotten no response
Following up on the committee’s discussion regarding the current state of this grant.
Given the situation with the upstream CCXT maintainer demanding $40k to merge the PR, the committee has decided to close this grant as partially completed, with the remainder terminated.
To summarise our position:
For what it’s worth, the committee genuinely appreciates the work that @tantodefi and @bhavya_gor put into this. The blocker here is entirely external and not a reflection on the quality of work delivered. Sometimes these things just don’t come together, and that’s no one’s fault on this side of the fence.
The lesson learnt for the grants programme going forward is fairly straightforward: when a deliverable hinges on a third party merging a PR, we need to either flag that as a significant risk upfront or define an alternative completion path that doesn’t introduce this kind of dependency. Gatekeeping and toll-booth behaviour, as we’ve seen from CCXT, is unfortunately not something we can control; structuring grants around it puts both the grantee and the programme in a rough spot.
We’ll mark this grant as partially completed in the pipeline. Cheers to you both for the effort and the transparency throughout.
