Mooove Over DEX's, CoW Swap is Something Better: Welcome to the Meta DEX Era

If you're reading this article you're more than likely familiar with decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized exchanges (DEX). And you may even be familiar with DEX aggregators who essentially search DeFi platforms like Uniswap for the optimal price on your trade and finalize the trade without navigating to the platforms themselves. DEX Ags also enable what's known as a non-custodial trading experience whereas trades are executed directly from the users wallet rather than being required to deposit the funds to the aggregators wallet.

In addition to optimal pricing and shear convenience, DEX Ags provide price impact protection by dividing trades of illiquid pairs across multiple exchanges thereby reducing price impact and affording better prices. Intent based aggregators are the most advanced form of DEX Ags and provide protection from a type of bot induced price exploitation called maximum extractable value (MEV) that has cost unaware traders over 1 billion $USD.

Intent Based Ags not only aggregate on-chain liquidity across exchanges and other aggregators, they also delegate execution to third parties referred to as "solvers". Solvers provide additional sources of liquidity by holding private inventory and matching trades peer-to-peer. This method avoids protocol fees and provides some of the best trades in DeFi.

CoW Swap is an Intent Based Meta DEX aggregator that utilizes solvers and additional features including MEV protection. Any time you make a DeFi trade whether its in the form of trading token pairs or NFTs or lending tokens to a liquidity pool, opportunistic users, typically known as "searchers", may manipulate your trades resulting in poor prices, failed execution, and missed opportunities. CoW Swap eliminates this issue as it's engineered and built with MEV protection. CoW Swap also provides users with an array of order types to choose from including:

• Market orders
• Limit orders
• TWAP orders - allow trades to be distributed over time
• Programmatic orders - customizable, conditional orders that fire when certain on-chain conditions are met including asset prices, wallet balances, elapsed time and more.
• CoW Hooks - allows users to pair any Ethereum action or set of actions with an order on the CoW Protocol while leveraging solvers to execute the actions together in sequence.

CoW Swap is not only the largest Intent Based Aggregators, it's also one of largest DEX Ag's in the world and in November 2024 settled $6.2 billion USD of trades - more than twice as much volume as all intent based aggregators combined. Yet with a market cap of $236 million USD, CoW Swap (ticker COW) remains relatively unknown to the market and undervalued. Even with its recent move from around $0.25 to its current price of $0.78, there is plenty of upside potential from here especially considering the nearly $8 billion USD market cap touted by Uniswap. Learn more about CoW Swap at cow.fi.