CoW Token is moving forward at full speed

After the successful vote on the proposals, vCOW token will become swappable for COW and will be transferable by anyone. Additionally, to kickstart COW tokens’ utility, COW holders will be able to get a discount when trading on CowSwap & will also be able to participate in a Liquidity Provider incentives program.

7 min readMar 28, 2022

TL:DR

CowDAO Governance structure is modified to take into account the account balance for both vCOW & COW, thus, users can convert all the tokens without losing any voting rights.
CIP:5 advances the CowDAO by allowing vCOW holders to swap vCOW for COW tokens directly on CowSwap.
Consequently, CowDAO will be able to proceed with additional proposals such as various token related incentive programs (Liquidity, token incentives to hodl, grants etc).
If you are a hodler of COW, you will get a discount when trading on CowSwap or Balancer UI. Depending on the amount of token you hodl, the discount will be higher or smaller.
If you are hodler of COW and would like to farm more COW tokens, head over to Balancer and Swapr and find the COW pools to deposit your tokens and start earning rewards.
The passing of these proposals makes the CoW Protocol ecosystem move at full speed ahead.

CowDAO Governance

This past week has been a monumental week for Cow Governance as three important and interrelated proposals were put up for voting on the CowDAO snapshot space. After the voting period ended, vCOW hodlers decided to pass all three of the proposals, being them:

CIP:3 Token Utility Program — Snapshot
CIP:4 Liquidity Incentive Program — Snapshot
CIP:5 Swapability of vCOW to COW — Snapshot

With the swapability of vCOW to COW taking place, the current governance in place for CowDAO needed a change, due to the fact that if users convert their vCOWs to COWs they will lose voting rights. This is why in the same swap proposal, it was proposed that CowDAO voting governance needed an upgrade.

The upgrade will adapt the snapshot space to count both vCOW and COW as valid for voting on CowDAO proposals. Therefore, from the point of view of the users, there is no need to worry about losing voting rights or power when swapping their vCOW tokens to COW tokens as the snapshot page will be able to combine both balances.

vCOW to COW Swapability

The moment every CoW has been waiting for is finally here. With the success of the CIP-5 proposal, vCOW holders will now be able to swap their non-transferable vCOW tokens for transferable COW tokens. This will be a major event for the CowDAO ecosystem as it will kickstart the price discovery for the COW token.

Any vCOW holder can now go to CowSwap, connect their wallet, click on the “Profile” Section and will see the total balancer of vCOW they hold, for which they will be able to swap entirely into the new COW tokens. *Note that this only applies to vested vCOW tokens, if your vCOW tokens are unvested, you will need to wait until they become available for you to swap them into COW tokens.

The proposal for token swap specified that in order to enable the swapAll function that is part of the vCOW tokens smart contract and have the tokens balances tradeable, CowDAO will send the COW tokens from its treasury into the vCOW contract. The final amount of COW tokens to be sent to the vCOW contract is 47.48% of the total supply and was known on 25.03.2022, as it was the last day available to claim the airdropped vCOW tokens. Additionally the needed amount of COW tokens will be bridged and sent to the vCOW contract on Gnosis Chain to enable swapping of vCOW.

Because of the transferability of the COW token, CowDAO will be able to proceed with additional important proposals such as the Token Utility program, the liquidity incentives program, Community Grant Program, Affiliate Program Incentives, Solver Incentives, and more. All these initiatives will aim to benefit the overall CowDAO ecosystem and the well being of COW token holders.

The Ethereum mainnet COW token contract address is: 0xDEf1CA1fb7FBcDC777520aa7f396b4E015F497aB

The Gnosis Chain COW token contract address is:
0x177127622c4A00F3d409B75571e12cB3c8973d3c

Token Utility Program

Even though the successful vote on CIP5 enabled the tradability of COW tokens and thus the process of token price discovery can begin, CowDAO strongly believes in the long term potential of the COW token and one of the ways to give utility to such tokens is through the Token Utility program.

The Token Utility proposal allows CowDAO to reward and incentivize long term hodling by allowing COW token hodlers to enjoy trading fee discounts when trading on any CoW Protocol Interfaces (CowSwap, Balancer.. etc). The program has a system for multiple tiers to ensure that discounts can be offered to almost everyone. In theory, the closer a user is to the lower bound of their tier, the less likely they are to sell any tokens.

Tier 1: 1,000 COW Discount: 5%
Tier 2: 10,000 COW Discount: 10%
Tier 3: 100,000 COW Discount: 20%
Tier 4: 1,000,000 COW Discount: 40%

The way in which this program works is that when you connect the wallet that holds COW tokens, CowSwap will read the amount of tokens you hold in that account. Each time you make a trade, it will check that you indeed hold x amount of COW tokens, and will then apply the corresponding discount to the trade you are about to place.

Some relevant aspects to highlight from this token utility program is that the program is mainly conceived to be used in Ethereum Mainnet, as it’s the network in which transaction fees often reach high prices. Thus, the program will only work for COW balances held in Ethereum and not on Gnosis Chain. The reason being is that, Gnosis Chain has already quite a low transaction fee price, that very often under fraction of a cent in USD value, which is why applying an additional discount does not make as much sense as in Ethereum. Additionally, the token utility program as is, will end if the allocated funds for it are fully used, or after 6 full months since deployment have passed.

*Note that CowDAO and COW holders reserve the right to modify the program at any given time as long as the modification proposal follows the established governance process.

Liquidity Incentive Program

In order to proceed with the token price discovery, there needs to be a set of different AMM liquidity pools so that users can trade COW tokens. Of course, due to the nature of DeFi, CowDAO cannot control the set of different pools that users create, and can only control the liquidity pools mentioned in the proposal.

Within the proposal, it is stated that in order to give further utility to the COW token, CowDAO will establish a liquidity incentive program, for which 960K COW tokens will be dedicated for a period of 12 weeks. In order to encourage Liquidity Providers to provide the necessary liquidity to have a healthy token price discovery process, the program has big incentives for those willing to provide liquidity for extra COW tokens.

The program is proposed to incentivize the following liquidity pools:

Ethereum Mainnet

Balancer pool: 50%COW/50%ETH (https://app.balancer.fi/#/pool/0xde8c195aa41c11a0c4787372defbbddaa31306d2000200000000000000000181)
Balancer pool: 50%COW/50%GNO (https://app.balancer.fi/#/pool/0x92762b42a06dcdddc5b7362cfb01e631c4d44b40000200000000000000000182)

Weekly rewards *per pool*:

30K COW
200 BAL
30 GNO

[COW + BAL rewards are fixed over 12 weeks, GNO rewards might be adjusted on a weekly basis]

Balancer will implement a dual rewards for LPs similar to the wstETH pool 4 for 12 weeks following the execution of this proposal. The duration will be of 12 weeks for 200-BAL-per-week for each pool.

CowDAO: will implement rewards for 12 weeks and of 30k-COW-per-week for each pool.

Gnosis Chain

Swapr pool: 50%COW/50%ETH (https://swapr.eth.link/#/rewards/0x177127622c4A00F3d409B75571e12cB3c8973d3c/0x6A023CCd1ff6F2045C3309768eAd9E68F978f6e1/0x2A1845fD5F747fd12217Add8E058E00BdF7E889B?chainId=100)

Total rewards over 12 weeks:

240K COW (20K per week)
350K SWPR
65 GNO

DXdao will implement a reward strategy that will include base triple rewards and an extra performance reward in Carrot tokens. In order to achieve optimized liquidity, a 4-week campaign with ~40% of capital and a follow up 8-week campaign with 60% of capital. This pool can be used as an example for how it would roughly look.

CowDAO: will implement rewards for 12 weeks and of 20k-COW-per-week for each pool.

The program is intended to target an estimated 15%-20% APY on capital locked (but of course depends ultimately on utilization of the pools). *Note that rewards will be assessed and potentially extended and / or changed by CowDAO and other parties.

Conclusion

CoW Protocol ecosystem is moving at full speed ahead. With the ability to transfer the COW token, it is expected that the ecosystem around the protocol will grow much bigger due to the different programs around the token. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a fun ride!!

#CoWGMI

About CowDAO

CowDAO is an open organization of developers, traders, market makers and many more community members aligned with its vision. CowDAO is focused on fair and decentralized trading systems — in particular, building, maintaining and advancing the Cow Protocol. Cow Protocol technology powers a network of traders and solvers, enabling trustless and efficient peer-to-peer trading. Leveraging batch auctions as a key concept uniquely positions Cow Protocol as native trading infrastructure for discrete-time settlement layers like Ethereum and enables fair and accessible trading to its users.

Check out our website https://cow.fi/

🐦 Twitter| 📒 Documentation| 💬 Discord | 📊 Analytics | 📸 Snapshot