CoW Swap Aims for 33% Volume Surge With New ’Collaboration’ Feature—And Yes, More Token Handouts

DEX aggregator CoW Swap is betting big on trader FOMO—launching a ’collaboration’ feature that promises juicy rewards (read: more token emissions) to boost volumes by a third. Because what crypto needs right now is another incentive scheme to temporarily pump metrics.

The move targets liquidity fragmentation across Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem—letting traders split orders between protocols while allegedly getting better rates. Translation: another band-aid solution for a market that still can’t decide if it wants decentralization or efficiency.

Will it work? Maybe. For about six weeks—until the next shiny DeFi carrot dangles elsewhere. Meanwhile, the 0x and 1inch teams are probably drafting their own ’community collaboration’ press releases as we speak.

More rewards

With more solvers able to participate on CoW Swap at the same time, the average rewards they can earn should increase by around 25%, CoW DAO said.

While that’s great for solvers, it isn’t so cut and dried for the protocol.

Cow Swap solvers are compensated in COW tokens, the protocol’s governance token. If, for example, CoW Swap pays out more in rewards without a commensurate amount of increased trading, it will hurt the protocol’s efficiency.

Canidio said she expects CoW Swap to benefit from higher transaction throughput with “a less-than-proportional rise in solver rewards.”

Simply put, Combinatorial Auctions should make CoW Swap more efficient.

CoW Swap says it expects testing of the new system to start around May 20, and the full launch on all chains to happen around June 3.