Author: Frank, PANews

Recently, the Trump family’s encryption project World Liberty has increased its holdings of Ethereum significantly and other assets, in the process of increasing holdings, almost all operations are completed through CoW Protocol. It seems that the Trump family has a special love for this aggregator. In addition, Ethereum founder Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation also frequently use CoW Protocol for asset transfers and transactions. But for ordinary users, CoW Protocol is obviously not as well-known as DEX products such as Uniswap and 1inch. It was not until recently due to the use of the Trump family that attention to the CoW Protocol rose to a new level, and its token COW also came after Trump was elected. From November 6 to December 25, it rose as much as 392%.

CoW Protocol was founded in 2020 and incubated by the Ethereum infrastructure builder Gnosis team. Its founder Anna George is also the commercial director of Gnosis. From 2016 to 2017, Anna George served as a monitoring and evaluation expert at the United Nations.

As of January 23, data shows that the number of daily active users of CoW Protocol has only reached more than 1,000 even after significant growth. The previous number of daily users was only a few hundred per day. But judging from the cumulative transaction volume, the project's cumulative transaction volume has reached 77 billion US dollars. In the Ethereum ecosystem, this value can rank seventh. In December 2024, CoW reached a transaction volume of US$7.8 billion. Based on the daily active users of approximately 1,600 days in December, the average total transaction volume completed by each user on CoW in a single month reached US$4.87 million. From this point of view, CoW deserves its reputation as the exclusive trading pool for large investors.

CoW Protocol has many technical features. When it comes down to the effect, the main ones are Eliminated MEV and low transaction friction. The most distinctive core technical principle used is the "demand matching" mechanism. Regarding "demand matching", I won't give too much technical explanation here. In layman's terms, this mechanism is more like an on-chain The OTC market bypasses the needs of the AMM liquidity pool and directly matches two large investors with the same needs for pricing transactions. In this way, the MEV and transaction wear on the chain will alsoJust almost zero.

For users who spend millions or even tens of millions of dollars per transaction, this mechanism directly addresses the pain points and minimizes the impact on market prices. . This also explains why the Trump family project World Liberty chose to allocate assets through CoW Protocol. At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation, Vitalik and others are also keen to use this project. The Ethereum Foundation has sold coins through CoW many times.

But on the other hand, for ordinary users, what they may consider most is transaction speed, the number of transaction categories, and flexible transaction pools. In contrast, CoW Protocol’s matching mechanism does not lead in these aspects. But that doesn’t matter. For CoW Protocol, it seems that it was designed for big players from the beginning.

CoW Protocol has recently been favored by the World Liberty project. Its governance token COW will be available from November 6th. It has soared all the way, from a low of $0.25 to a high of $1.23. The largest increase reached 392%.

COW tokens have been issued and launched as early as 2022. The earliest opening price was about US$0.8. In the following year, the price dropped all the way, with the lowest price falling. To $0.062, it did not start to recover until 2023, but it has always hovered below $0.4 most of the time. Until September 2024, Coinbase announced that it would introduce CoW Protocol to the currency listing route. On November 6, many exchanges such as Binance and Bybit launched COW. Interestingly, this day is also the day Trump won the 2024 US election. It can be seen that various exchanges have added COW to the Trump series of related assets, and as soon as the election result came out, it immediately triggered market pursuit.

However, since Christmas, the price of COW tokens has begun to fall back all the way. As of January 23, its price had fallen to around $0.63, and the overall correction was close to 50% from the high point.

In addition to the traffic effect brought by hot spots, CoW Protocol's data performance itself has experienced huge growth in recent months. The most obvious thing is the trading volume. Since 2024, CoW Protocol's monthly trading volume has basically maintained a range of US$2 billion to US$3 billion. Starting from November,This figure began to surge to 6.2 billion U.S. dollars, and reached an all-time high of 7.8 billion U.S. dollars in December. Throughout 2024, CoW Protocol has always been less than 1 inch in the market share of Ethereum ecological aggregator, ranking second. On January 23, 2025, the data performance of that month exceeded 1inch for the first time, ranking first. However, the final ranking of the two for that month may not be known until early next month.

On January 22, Cow DAO released the CIP-61 proposal on Snapshot in an attempt to Achieve better income levels by further standardizing CoW Protocol’s charging model and ratio. According to the proposal, CoW Protocol achieved a total revenue of approximately US$6 million in 2024, but still failed to reach breakeven, with development costs (US$4.4 million), grants (US$700,000) and solver rewards (5.2 million) that year Dollar). Therefore, Cow DAO hopes that through this proposal, it can optimize users' transaction execution prices, create more additional value, reach breakeven as soon as possible, and get rid of the need for external funds.

According to the official CoW panel, the cumulative income of CoW DAO is 3648 Ethereum. Calculated at an Ethereum price of US$3300, the total income is approximately 1200 million dollars. In the Ethereum ecosystem, the income level of CoW Protocol can be ranked around the 50th level. As an aggregator that has been in operation for 4 years and ranks among the top in transaction volume, this income level is indeed low.

Coupled with the recent overall improvement in data, the CoW team clearly hopes to seize the current market opportunities and achieve new milestones. At present, the proposal has been successfully passed, but the discussion on social media is not very popular. The token market has not experienced significant price fluctuations as a result. Perhaps, for the CoW team, capturing big users only requires targeted products and designs, but capturing the masses seems to be much more difficult. For ordinary users and token investors, complex proposal expressions seem far less beneficial than a simple airdrop.