CoW Protocol is a permissionless decentralized exchange protocol that aggregates liquidity across automated market makers and private market makers, settling user trades through batch auctions rather than individual on-chain swaps. The protocol's defining mechanism is the coincidence of wants, where opposing trader intents within the same batch are matched directly without ever touching an external venue, eliminating the underlying liquidity provider fees and protecting the resulting price from miner extractable value attacks that plague conventional decentralized exchanges.

The end-user product surface is CoW Swap, a trader-facing web application where retail and professional users sign gasless trade intents that solvers compete to execute on their behalf at the best available all-in price. Beyond the swap interface the wider CoW ecosystem operates a constant-function automated market maker called CoW AMM that protects passive liquidity providers from the same extractable value problem, and an MEV Blocker remote procedure call endpoint that returns user trades to the front of the order flow auction.