Period: November 23 – November 29, 2025

🆕 New Developments

💼 2026 Grants Program Renewal Published • Draft live on governance forum

The committee published the 2026 renewal proposal, introducing quarterly fund releases instead of annual transfers. This allows up to 75% of idle assets to return to Treasury while maintaining grant approval flexibility. Current Safe holds 271K xDAI and 6.6M COW, with approximately 50K xDAI and 130K COW committed through Jan 2026. Strategic focus areas: developer onboarding/enablement, ecosystem alignment, and novel CoW applications.

📚 COW Value Distribution RFP

Core team developing an RFP for research on COW token value distribution, reviewed and approved by Anna and the senior economist. The grants committee will serve as a referee to ensure stakeholder participation beyond just core team direction—NotSoFormal noted this will bring more input on an important matter where internal alignment varies. The thread is opening soon for committee input. More details here.

🔗 CCXT Integration Progress

Tantodefi reached out to CCXT Pro maintainer contacts to help advance the CoW Protocol connector PR. MFW posted a review comment on GitHub PR #27319. Team coordinating with grantee Bhavya on next steps.

💻 Rust SDK Grant • Snapshot passed, implementation starting

The $8.5K Rust SDK grant from pstylez78 passed Snapshot vote. MFW assigned the ed as steward and reviewer, already thanked on the forum. Grant achieves feature parity with cow-sdk, contracts hashing utilities, and app-data. 8-week Phase 1 timeline plus 1-year maintenance. MFW noted he has use cases for this SDK.

📢 Community Growth Grant • Declined

SI<3 submitted a marketing/awareness proposal. Sov declined—program currently focuses on direct protocol impact (developer tooling, integrations, solver ecosystem, technical infrastructure). Applicant noted the website's "community growth" focus area could be clearer about these restrictions.

🚧 In Progress

🔨 Playground RFP Evaluations • MFW completing reviews

Three RFP responses under evaluation with active forum discussion:

• The Block Explorer Integration received a late submission from CoBuilders using Otterscan (2.5K+ GitHub stars, native Anvil support). They have a working PoC with Docker integration and demo screenshots showing transaction traces, logs, and call graphs. $7.5K ask ($5K xDAI + $2.5K COW) over 2-3 weeks. MFW flagged the original submission as AI-generated, with unnecessary Next.js overhead, and the applicant ignored suggestions to use Otterscan. MFW indicated the CoBuilders approach looks "much nicer."
• The Offline Development Mode from Bleu came in at $16.8K xDAI plus $ 16.8K COW maintenance. This is in a revised, reduced-scope proposal. PoC has already been completed with working end-to-end order settlement. Includes Uniswap V2 liquidity, periphery contracts (CoWShed, ComposableCoW, ERC1271Forwarder), and Watch Tower configuration. MFW asked about removing frontend work since CoBuilders could handle that with Otterscan. Bleu clarified that they can coordinate. Also noted: no Safe wallet needed—ERC1271Forwarder handles abstract account support.
• The Performance Testing Suite from Bleu ($27K xDAI + 27K COW maintenance, 9 weeks) is the strongest candidate. MFW confirmed this can proceed independently of offline mode if the archive node is available for forking. Bleu confirmed that the fork-first approach works with Anvil state caching. MFW is discussing with DevOps making a CoWDevOps node available for development—load-generation framework. The loads k6 (preferred for Grafana integration) include a CLI tool, Prometheus/Grafana dashboards, and regression detection.