What CoW Protocol?
CoW Protocol is a fully permission-less trading protocol that leverages so-called “Batch Auctions” as its price finding mechanism. CoW protocol enables batch auctions to maximize liquidity via Coincidence of Wants, CoW for short. The coincidence of wants is an economic phenomenon where two parties each hold an item the other wants, so they exchange these items directly without any monetary medium. Cowswap aims to find COW’s across its users to find the best price and protect them from MEV attacks.
CowSwap is the first trading interface built on top of CoW protocol. It guarantees users the best price by either:
Matching the user with a fitting sell order (CoW)
Routing the order to the best liquidity venue on-chain (Uniswap, Sushi etc.)
Effectively, Cowswap acts as Meta DEX aggregator.
The following are the CoW settlement contract transfers on the ETH Mainnet: