<p>Recently, the Trump family's crypto project World Liberty has significantly increased its holdings in Ethereum and other assets, with almost all transactions completed through the CoW Protocol. The CoW Protocol was incubated by the Gnosis team, and its founder, Anna George, previously served as a monitoring and evaluation expert for the United Nations. Despite having just over 1,000 daily active users, the total trading volume has reached $77 billion, with a record trading volume of $7.80 billion in December 2024. The 'demand matching' mechanism of the CoW Protocol eliminates MEV and reduces transaction friction, attracting large investors. The governance token COW surged by 392% after Trump's election but subsequently corrected by 50%. In 2024, revenue is approximately $6 million, still not breaking even, and the Cow DAO proposal aims to optimize the fee model to enhance revenue. The CoW Protocol ranks around 50th in terms of revenue within the Ethereum ecosystem, and the team hopes to achieve new milestones through market opportunities.</p>

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                        Its token COW also surged by as much as 392% from November 6 to December 25 after Trump's election.
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<p><span>Author: Frank, PANews</span></p>
<p>Recently, the Trump family's crypto project World Liberty has significantly increased its holdings of Ethereum and other assets, with almost all operations conducted through CoW Protocol, indicating the family's special affinity for this aggregator. Additionally, Ethereum's founder Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation frequently use CoW Protocol for asset transfers and transactions. However, for ordinary users, the recognition of CoW Protocol is evidently not on par with DEX products like Uniswap and 1inch. It was only recently, due to the Trump family's usage, that attention towards CoW Protocol has risen, with its token COW experiencing a peak increase of 392% from November 6 to December 25 following Trump's election.</p>
<h3>Preferred by Large Players as the "OTC Market" in DEX</h3>
<p>CoW Protocol was created in 2020 by the Gnosis team, builders of Ethereum infrastructure, with its founder Anna George also serving as Gnosis's business director. From 2016 to 2017, Anna George was a monitoring and evaluation expert for the United Nations.</p>
<p>As of January 23, data shows that CoW Protocol's daily active users, even after a noticeable increase, have only reached just over 1,000. Previously, the daily user count was merely in the hundreds. However, in terms of cumulative trading volume, the project has achieved a total trading volume of $77 billion, ranking seventh within the Ethereum ecosystem. In December 2024, CoW set a record of $7.80 billion in trading volume, and with an average of about 1,600 daily active users in December, each user completed an average monthly trading total of $4.87 million on CoW. This suggests that CoW, as an exclusive trading pool for large participants, is well-deserved.</p>
<p><img src='https://sosovalue.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/sosovalue/web3image/25/01/26/o9u4ttw6so1e.png'/></p>
<p>CoW Protocol has several technical features, which can be summarized as effectively eliminating MEV and low trading friction. The core technological principle used is the "demand matching" mechanism. Without going into too much technical explanation, this mechanism functions similarly to an on-chain OTC market, bypassing AMM liquidity pools and directly matching two large participants with identical demands for price trading. Thus, on-chain MEV and trading slippage are virtually eliminated.</p>
<p>For users making trades worth millions or even tens of millions of dollars, this mechanism directly addresses pain points while minimizing impact on market prices. This also explains why the Trump family's project World Liberty chose to allocate assets through CoW Protocol. Simultaneously, the Ethereum Foundation and individuals like Vitalik are also keen users of this project, with the foundation frequently selling coins through CoW.</p>
<p>On the other hand, ordinary users may be more concerned about trading speed, the variety of trading pairs, and flexible trading pools. In comparison, CoW Protocol’s matching mechanism does not lead in these aspects. However, this does not seem to matter; it appears that CoW Protocol was initially designed specifically for large participants.</p>
<h3>Data Shows Improvement, Aiming to Increase Revenue Levels</h3>
<p>Recently, CoW Protocol has benefited from the World Liberty project, with its governance token COW starting to soar in price from November 6, rising from a low of $0.25 to a maximum of $1.23, with the highest increase reaching 392%.</p>
<p>The COW token was originally issued in 2022, with an initial opening price of about $0.80. Over the following year, the price fell significantly, dropping to a low of $0.062, and it wasn’t until 2023 that it began to rebound, mostly staying below $0.40. It wasn’t until September 2024 that Coinbase announced the introduction of CoW Protocol into its listing route. On November 6, multiple exchanges, including Binance and Bybit, concentrated on listing COW. Interestingly, this day also coincided with Trump winning the 2024 U.S. presidential election. It is evident that exchanges have added COW to the assets related to Trump, and the election result immediately sparked market enthusiasm.</p>
<p>However, after Christmas, the COW token price began to decline. As of January 23, its price had fallen to around $0.63, reflecting an overall correction of nearly 50% from its peak.</p>
<p>Setting aside the traffic effects brought by the hot topic, CoW Protocol’s data performance itself has seen significant growth in recent months. Most notably, trading volume has remained in the range of $2 billion to $3 billion per month since the beginning of 2024. Starting in November, this figure began to surge to $6.20 billion, with December reaching a historic high of $7.80 billion. Throughout 2024, CoW Protocol has consistently ranked second in market share among Ethereum ecosystem aggregators, trailing only behind 1inch.</p>
</div>On January 23, 2025, the monthly data performance has for the first time surpassed 1inch, ranking first. However, the final rankings for both may not be revealed until early next month.</p>
<p><img src='https://sosovalue.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/sosovalue/web3image/25/01/26/vimgttw6soqk.png'/></p>
<p>On January 22, Cow DAO released proposal CIP-61 on Snapshot, attempting to achieve better revenue levels by further standardizing the fee model and proportions of the CoW Protocol. According to the proposal, the CoW Protocol generated approximately 6 million USD in revenue in 2024 but still failed to reach breakeven, with development costs (4.40 million USD), grants (700 thousand USD), and solver rewards (5.20 million USD) for that year. Therefore, Cow DAO hopes that this proposal will optimize users' transaction execution prices, create more additional value to reach breakeven sooner, and reduce reliance on external funding.</p>
<p>According to the official CoW dashboard, Cow DAO's cumulative revenue is 3,648 ETH, which amounts to approximately 12 million USD when calculated at an ETH price of 3,300 USD. Within the Ethereum ecosystem, the revenue level of the CoW Protocol ranks around 50th, which is relatively low for an aggregator that has been operating for four years and ranks among the top in trading volume.</p>
<p>With the recent overall improvement in data, the CoW team clearly hopes to seize the current market opportunity to achieve new milestones. Currently, the proposal has passed smoothly, although the discussion on social media is not very heated. The token market has not shown significant price fluctuations as a result. Perhaps for the CoW team, attracting large holders may only require targeted products and designs, but capturing the general public seems to be much more difficult. For ordinary users and token investors, the complex expression of proposals appears far less appealing than a simple airdrop.

Trump's Team's "Preferred" DEX CoW Protocol: An Exclusive Aggregator for Whales, Generated $6 Million in Revenue Last Year but Still Operating at a Loss