Felix Leupold: CowSwap – Tackling the Shortcomings of AMMs

Originally started with a focus on prediction markets, Gnosis has done innovative work around automated market makers (AMMs) and decentralized exchanges for years. The latest protocol launched by the Gnosis team is CowSwap. CowSwap introduces various innovations that could improve user experience, reduce gas costs, reduce the effects of MEV and result in better outcomes for retail traders.

We were joined by Felix Leupold, software developer at Gnosis to discuss CowSwap and the future of decentralized exchanges.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Felix's background and how he started working on CowSwap with Gnosis
• Why did Gnosis make the  shift away from prediction markets, and why the return to focus on AMMs
• The relationship between Gnosis Protocol and CowSwap
• How CowSwap works from a user perspective
• How are solvers chosen and what are the incentives around providing solutions
• What MEV is and why it’s a problem
• The upcoming integration with Balancer V2
• How fees in CowSwap work and the effect on LPs
• Where is CowSwap today and what is its roadmap
• Felix's views on the future of order-book based exchanges

Episode links:

• CowSwap
• Gnosis
• CowSwap on Twitter
• Felix on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Solana: Solana is the high performance blockchain supporting over 50k transactions per second to power the next generation of decentralized applications. - https://solana.com/epicenter
• Exodus: Exodus the easy-to-use crypto wallet available on all platforms and supporting over 100 different assets. - https://exodus.com/epicenter

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/399