Grant Application: Community-built Rust SDK for CoW Protocol

Grant Title: Community-built Rust SDK for CoW Protocol

Author:

• GitHub: https://github.com/mfw78

About You:

• Experienced in technical systems analysis, design and implementation with a strong emphasis on risk management / gap analysis.
• Experienced technical writer in mission-critical, highly regulated, and technical industries.
• Active Core Contributor to CoW Protocol and CoW Grants Committee Shepherd.

Grant category: Protocol Order Flow / Developer tools

Grant Description:

Problem: Builders and developers come from many different technical backgrounds. Rust has become the predominant language for blockchain infrastructure, yet CoW Protocol lacks a Rust SDK. While JavaScript has cow-sdk and Python now has cow-py, there is no maintained, up-to-date Rust equivalent. A previous grant for a Rust SDK was awarded in November 2025 but has been cancelled due to non-delivery.

Solution: Following the successful community contributor model pioneered by cow-py, this grant sets aside funding within the Grants DAO to fund contributors to a CoW Protocol Rust SDK (cow-rs). Rather than funding a single developer, we open this to the herd – any contributor can submit code to the designated repository, and the Grants Committee will distribute funds based on assessed contribution.

Grant Goals and impact:

• Extend CoW Protocol tooling to the widely-used Rust programming language.
• Enable integration with Rust-based solver infrastructure, MEV tooling, and blockchain clients.
• With WASM compilation support, enable use of the SDK in web application contexts.
• Foster community engagement through collaborative, open development.
• Provide a foundation for Rust-based trading bots, analytics tools, and protocol integrations.

Milestones:

Phase one (feature parity):

1. Contributors commit code to the cowdao-grants/cow-rs repository and progressively work together in the herd to achieve feature parity with: a. @cowprotocol/cow-sdk – order creation, signing, and submission b. @cowprotocol/contracts – hashing utilities and contract interaction c. @cowprotocol/app-data – metadata encoding and CID pinning
2. Additionally: a. Subgraph querying capabilities b. Blockchain data fetching and decoding c. WASM compilation target for web application use d. Comprehensive unit tests, integration tests, and examples e. Published to crates.io

Phase two (maintenance):

1. Contributors maintain the CoW Protocol Rust SDK over the course of one year from Phase 1 completion. This includes bug triage, dependency updates, feature requests, and keeping pace with upstream protocol changes.

Grant Timeline:

Phase one: Open-ended. No fixed deadline – contributors work at their own pace. Funding is released upon the Grants Committee's assessment that feature parity has been reached.

Phase two: From 1 year after Phase 1 complete.

Funding Request:

$8,500 xDAI for Phase One. Based on the Grants Committee assessment (and whose decision is final), the funding will be divided amongst contributors to the Rust SDK proportional to their contribution.

Once the Rust SDK reaches feature parity, the orders routed by the Rust SDK will become eligible for the Volume Grants Program. Funds from the Volume Grants Program (if any), will be distributed to original developers, and maintainers, on a ratio basis to be solely determined by the Grants Committee.

Budget Breakdown:

• $8,500 xDAI: development / labour cost, distributed across contributors.
• Volume Grants Program

Gnosis Chain Address (to receive the grant): N/A. This is for a budget allocation to be distributed to contributors.

Other Information: As an active member of the CowDAO Grants Committee, I hereby refrain from voting / signing on this proposal so as to eliminate conflicts of interest. This grant supersedes the previously cancelled Rust SDK grant; all contributors, including the previous grantee, are welcome to participate on equal footing. The repository is hosted at https://github.com/cowdao-grants/cow-rs.

Referral: N/A

Terms and conditions:

By applying for this grant, I agree to be bound by the CowDAO Participation Agreement and the COWDAO Grant Terms and Conditions