Update on CIP-58: Funding for development services - Service Agreement fulfilment

General
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Simple Summary

This post shares the financial execution of CIP-58: Funding for development services - Service Agreement No 4, from Jan ‘25 to Aug ‘25 (Year to Date - YTD), with the CoWmunity.

The Core Team has been focusing on developing and deploying CoW DAO products across the ecosystem. After network expansion in late 2024 to Arbitrum and Base, 2025 has been rift with new initiatives and ambitious plans, such as further chain coverage, research on MEV and new products and relevant partnerships, and the support on the launch of CoW Foundation.

The team participated in ETHCC 2025 and Dappcon 2025, with Business Development efforts on several other conferences, and expected to continue expanding CoW’s brand further until December.

All of this, while keeping fiscal responsibility, and being careful on the allocation of funds.

Detailed review

Timeline: Jan ‘25 to Aug ‘25 (8 months)

Currency: USD

Basis: Accrual basis

CIP: CIP-58: Funding for development services - Service Agreement No 4

Nomev Labs requested a total funding of 7,600,000 USD for the provision of services for the year, pertaining to 5.1m USD as a new allocation from CoW’s treasury and the remainder from funds that the company had underutilized from prior year(s).

During this period, the team proposed 6 relevant CIPs, around the mechanism design, economics of CoW DAO and ensuring that protocol is profitable.

Research and Mechanism improvement initiatives:

CIP-61: price-improvement-share, Revenue-share and Fees on CoW Protocol - Where Fee methodology was summarised and a mandate for new Revenue mechanisms for CoW DAO was implemented.
CIP-65: Updating the score definition for buy orders - Improvements on the mechanism for buy orders.
CIP-66: Flash-Loan Router Integration - Developing and implementing a Flash-Loan feature (key for high value integrations).
CIP-67: Switching to the Fair Combinatorial Auction - Research (paper), development and implementation of an upgrade to the batching mechanism, converting it to a Fair Combinatorial Auction, in order to improve throughput and experience for users.
CIP-68: Distributing COW rewards on mainnet for all chains - Suggesting an improvement in the rewards distribution mechanism, improving the operational burden for solvers and Core Team.
CIP-72: Aligning quoting and solving behavior of solvers - Refining the Quote Rewards mechanism, ensuring better DAO profitability.

* * * *

Other than the above initiatives, several Knowledge Base posts were added to educate users on features like TWAP, LVR.

During this period, the main features delivered were the cross-chain swap and bridge implementation. Other smaller deliverables were the CoW AMM launch in Base, the launch of Backed tokenised Stocks in Gnosis Chain, Limit order feature expansion, to state a few.

The following table presents the financial spent by Nomev:

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Note : Variance = CIP amount (monthly)- Actual , positive variations means we are under budget and vice-versa

With the mandate CIP-64: Incorporation of a legal structure for CoW DAO leading to the incorporation of CoW Foundation and other entities in Q2 2025, we see an increase in overall budget execution. Currently the funds allocated under CIP-58: Funding for development services - Service Agreement No 4 are underspent, but are expected to be fully spent as more individuals are being hired for the engineering team(due to new network launch and maintenance) and Marketing spend on events and paid media is ramping up.

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These investments are aimed towards success on two fronts. On one side, creating more volume for CoW through the capture of market share. Extend CoW presence to other L2s, ensuring more coverage and growth potential for the products.

Future outlook

In terms of future development, the CoW team is focused on:

  1. Mechanism design - Reviewing the current mechanism reward structure to increase Protocol profitability.

  2. New networks - Launch in new networks, such as BSC.

  3. High volume integrations - Develop the relations with other key protocols to integrate CoW into their underlying swap engines, allowing for more volume for the Protocol.

We appreciate feedback from the community on this report to assess its usefulness and format.

The Core Team expects to publish a new update with the next Service Agreement proposal which will be put forth with sufficient time so that runway does not become a bottleneck to the development of the CoW Suite. We estimate this to be in late November .

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Great to see CoW continuing to improve the product. As the report highlights, the team has launched several new initiatives, particularly in mechanism design, cross-chain expansion and other area, showing continued improvement in the protocol

For future reports, it would be helpful to include impact KPIs alongside financial data to show how budget spending correlates with protocol growth.

Additionally, we would like to clarify our understanding of Nomev Labs: is Nomev Labs a company owned or operated by the CoW core team?

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Hi Curia,
Appreciate the kind words.
Given CIP-64 - Incorporation of a legal structure for CoW DAO, we (Core Team) believe that all ecosystem reporting is the responsibility of the Foundation and its team (transparency reporting and requesting Dune dashboards to be built). Hence, this report focuses on the utilization of the budget requested through the service agreement, and not a deep KPI analysis.

Nomev Labs is an independent service provider that contracts the “Core Team”. It was engaged by CoW DAO (CIP-58) to provide Core Team services to the DAO, and subsequently, upon CIP-64, to CoW Foundation and its sub-entities.

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