Simple summary
This post shares the financial execution of CIP-79: Continued funding for Development Services - Service Agreement No 5. V2, from Jan ‘26 to Aug ‘26 (Year to Date - YTD), with the CoWmunity.
The Core Team has been focusing on developing and deploying CoW DAO products across the ecosystem. We kept building on a multi-chain CoW Protocol, launching in Ink (leading to a strong Tydro integration) and Plasma as part of an expansion strategy that started in late 2024. Growth has been a key area of attention, with CoW’s Affiliate Program launching and generating more than $170M volume by July.
On the mechanism side, the Core Team developed and deployed changes to auction information disclosure, and progressed the removal of Uniform Clearing Price (UCP) constraints (estimated to conclude by H2). The period ends with a v2 launch of Consistency Metrics and a new CIP launched regarding Penalty Redesign, both of which support Solver unit economics and incentivize a healthier and broader competition.
The team was present at key industry events like ETHCC, ETH Prague, Consensus, and Ondo Finance Summit, among others, pursuing a BD-first approach to growth, reducing costs, and maximising pipeline generation efforts. We expect to be present at Devcon 8, representing CoW Protocol in the main builder event of the year for Ethereum.
CoW Protocol keeps its goal of being the best price finding venue.
Detailed review
Timeline: Jan ‘26 to Aug ‘26 (8 months)
Currency: USD
Basis: Accrual basis
CIP: CIP-79: Continued funding for Development Services - Service Agreement No 5. V2
Nomev Labs requested a total funding of 12,600,000 USD for the provision of services for the year. The sections below group the period’s work by area, followed by the governance record and the financial execution against that budget.
Protocol and solver economics
The largest share of engineering effort went into the auction mechanism and solver unit economics.
Solver competition was upgraded so that bids remain hidden until the auction deadline, removing the ability to observe rivals mid-auction and pushing solvers toward independent strategies. Work also progressed on removing Uniform Clearing Price (UCP) constraints. Full removal continues into H2, since it also requires changes to “executed fee” concept and changes to fee display, and buffer accounting.
Consistency Metric v2 shipped in June under the CIP-85 mandate, scoring solvers on relative surplus multiplied by settlement success rate. The period closed with the Penalty Cap Redesign mandate (CIP-87), linking penalty caps to trade size. Implementation follows in September.
Alongside these, the team published the Solvers page on the Explorer and shipped LLM-ready documentation, and opened the Bring Your Own Solver RFP, which led to a grant to the Bleu team in July to build a permissionless sub-solver gateway.
Network expansion
CoW Protocol launched on Plasma in January as the network’s first live aggregator, and on Ink in February, which brought a Tydro integration shortly after. Both extend the multi-chain strategy that began in late 2024.
In July, CoW Swap’s cross-chain flow was extended beyond EVM networks. A user can now name a Bitcoin or Solana destination address when trading: the swap leg is settled by solvers on the origin EVM network, and the bridging leg is fulfilled by the integrated third-party bridge provider, which delivers the bought asset to the non-EVM address. Cross-chain coverage is no longer limited to EVM-to-EVM routes.
Integrations and business development
The period completed the shift toward a B2B-centric product, with integration quality of service as the organising priority.
CoW Protocol launched key integrations across DeFi and wallets: Euler as a swap execution layer (May), Summer.fi vault deposits and withdrawals (June), Lido fast swaps (April), Bitget Wallet and Arcadia (March), Safe{Mobile} with WalletConnect (July), and earlier in the year Ondo Finance, TokenPocket and HeyElsaAI. Tokenised assets expanded with xStocks on BNB Chain and cbMEGA on Base from day one.
Atomic Bundles launched on 1 May as a B2B integration enabler, simplifying the launch of leverage and vault-based features with integration partners.
The team attended ETHCC, ETH Prague, Consensus, Ondo Finance Summit and pursued a BD-first approach to growth, reducing cost per opportunity while maximising pipeline generation. CoW Protocol is expected to be represented at Devcon 8.
Growth and marketing
The CoW Swap Affiliate Program launched in April following its March governance approval, and had referred more than $170M in volume by July.
More than 90 Knowledge Base articles were published as part of the content strategy, building organic discovery for CoW Protocol and CoW Swap.
Security
Not everything was positive. In April, the cow.fi domain was hijacked through a social engineering failure in the domain control supply chain outside the Core Team’s control, as set out in the post-mortem and CIP-86. The domain was recovered, the community was updated in real time, and a discretionary grants programme for affected users ran from 8 to 31 May, paying approximately 1.2M USDC from the Legal Defense Reserve.
We promoted extra security audits and a full opsec review on the infrastructure to avoid further incidents. Work in progress or completed includes registrar change and hardening of lock mechanisms, identity and access hardening, endpoint detection and response rollout, secrets and credential management, supply-chain and image security, release integrity tooling, among others.
Governance
Four CIPs were proposed by the Core Team during the period.
Corporate and transparency
The sale of CoW DAO’s stake in MEV Blocker was finalised under the mandate granted in the prior period, generating additional cash flow for the DAO and simplifying the engineering stack the team maintains.
Three transparency initiatives were completed:
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Token Terminal — professional-grade reporting and data distribution on enterprise feeds, with Q1 and Q2 2026 reports published
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Aragon Ownership Token Framework — live, setting out how value streams to tokenholders and what rights they hold
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Blockworks Token Transparency filing — live since July, covering token supply, allocations and revenue disclosures
CoW DAO also joined the Encrypt the Mempool Coalition.
Performance data for the period is published in the Token Terminal quarterly reports linked at the end of this post.
Financial execution
a) CIP-79: Continued funding for Development Services – Service Agreement No 5. V2
The Core Team was allocated 12,600,000 USD for 2026. Including August, a total of $8,403,930 was invoiced against this budget - 66.7% of the annual allocation across 66.7% of the year, in line with plan.
b) CIP-83: Renewing Team Grant Allocation with Performance-Linked Milestones
The Core Team grant allocation is gated under four revenue-based milestones. Milestone 1 was achieved in February, allocating 25M COW to the team’s pool.
Future outlook
In terms of future development, the CoW team is focused on:
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Winning more non-exclusive order flow - Improve CoW Protocol’s mechanism design and infrastructure to become more competitive in integrations where CoW Protocol is not the only integrated swap provider, this includes: shorter auction times, faster quoting, and winning niche asset markets (e.g. RWAs). A more detailed view on the projects developed is shared below:
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Quote Reward Redesign: better quote incentives, so quoted prices sit closer to what the protocol achieves at settlement.
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Implementation of Penalties Redesign: implementation of the CIP-87 mandate.
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Faster Auctions: one auction per block on mainnet and five-second auctions on L2s, increasing throughput and allowing more volume to settle faster.
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“Fast-path" / out-of-competition execution: Allow for orders to be exclusively settled by the quoting solver. This feature is expected to unlock better quotes and higher execution velocity, supporting increased B2B volume.
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Improvements to Streaming Quote API: rollout to main integrators, letting each tune quoting cadence and the data received.
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Anti-spam and micropayments: Further develop anti-spam measures (CAPTCHAs) to apply free-quote tiers to humans only, while giving usage-based pricing to bots that request information from CoW Swap and/or CoW Protocol.
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Solana - Development of the key infrastructure needed to deploy on Solana, expanding outside of the EVM ecosystem and into the missing top 5 chain in terms of DeFi TVL and a key source of DEX volume.
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Specialised features - Develop the features that differentiate CoW Protocol from other DEX aggregators, such as Programmatic Orders Framework, namely, TWAP for EOAs.
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.
Other sources of data
Monthly updates:
Token terminal financial quarter updates