CoW Swap | Paraswap | Definitive

• Since the beginning of the year, the crypto market has shown signs of recovery, coinciding with a surge in memecoin popularity. Consequently, the year-to-date trading volume on aggregators has surpassed $221.48B, driven by over 243M transactions. 1inch has maintained a dominant position among aggregators with a YTD volume of $109.45B. CoW Swap and Paraswap follow with with $24.9B and $22.9B respectively.

• In terms of growth rates, aggregators overall demonstrate positive trends. Kyberswap particularly stands out, achieving remarkable growth across key metrics — a 4.7x increase in trading volume, 2.3x growth in transaction count, and a 1.2x expansion of its user base.

• Regarding source DEXs, Uniswap has maintained the highest connectivity across all chains. It has achieved a dominant market share of 38.6%, with a total trading volume of $906.6B. Curve and Balancer follow, capturing market shares of 11.1% and 7.8%, respectively.

• In the past month and with a whopping $3.6B traded, CoW Swap surpassed both Uniswap and 1inch in terms of frontend market share by Ethereum trading volume. This growth highlights CoW Swap's rising influence as a brand, reflecting increasing user trust due to its benefits from leveraging frequent batch auctions. The $3.6B in volume came from ~93k orders, making the average trade on CoW Swap approximately $38k.

• The largest trade in September was a $10M swap from USDT to DAI, distributed across five different platforms. A solver, a program which computes the best way to make a trade in terms of price, first traded USDT for USDC across four DEXs, Uniswap, Curve, Dodo, and Balancer Vault, and then tapped directly into Sky's, formerly Maker, new Peg Stability Module, which offers direct USDC-to-DAI swaps. This last step completed the $10M trade.

• CoW Swap has the highest user retention rate among DEX aggregators, consistently ranging from 34% to 41% since January 2024. At a 35.6% in September, retention rate remains stable, underscoring strong user loyalty in a competitive market.

• ParaSwap is a DEX aggregator that consolidates liquidity from multiple DEXs on the Ethereum blockchain. The price of PSP, ParaSwap's token, fell from Oct. 1 to 12, coinciding with overall bearish market sentiment. The Fear & Greed Index stood at 42, indicating "Fear" as technical indicators showed bearish trends. PSP traded below its 50-day and 200-day simple moving average, with a 14-day relative strength index of 44.0. ParaSwap also underperformed the broader crypto market, dropping 1.60% over 7 days while the market rose 0.80%.

• Ethereum leads Paraswap’s cumulative volume by blockchain with ~$11B volume. Arbitrum, a major Layer 2, follows with $4.5B and Polygon, a proof-of-stake chain closely associated with Ethereum, ranks third at $3B. Other chains like Optimism, Avalanche, and BNB have lower volumes, ranging from ~$500M to $1.5B.

• Paraswap's user base of 2.06M unique value users positions it as a significant mid-tier player in the DEX aggregator market, though it still trails market leaders like 1inch which have over 4M+ users. Still, the substantial 2M+ user base enables Paraswap to secure competitive rates through sufficient trading volume, creating a powerful network effect where increased users lead to better rates, which in turn attracts more users.

• Definitive is an onchain trading & yield aggregator. It offers sophisticated trading features and algorithms across 7 Ethereum Virtual Machine chains & Solana, routing trades through 100+ DEXs. As an example of Definitive's capabilities, funds like Starkiller Capital used the aggregator to buy $700k of AERO, the hot token issued by Aerodrome. The order was split into 678 fills, routing across 10+ venues, and cost only $10.71 in network fees. This strategy minimized market impact and yielded ~20% more AERO compared to OTC desks, which typically have wide bid-ask spreads for small and mid-cap tokens.

• Similarly, DeFi whales are using Definitive to execute large memecoin and small-cap token trades with minimal market impact. One user executed a trade of 150 ETH for INST, the token of the "everything platform" Instadapp, over 2 weeks, achieving +7.5% price improvement and reducing gas fees to 0.3% by splitting orders across 100+ liquidity venues.

• Not only a DEX aggregator, Definitive also aggregates yield strategies across 50+ protocols, offering 2-5x standard yields with strategies like Hyperstaking, which is a leverage liquid staking position. Typically used by advanced traders, Definitive automates complex risk management, making these yield accessible.