Скачать или смотреть CowSwap CEO Anna George Explains MEV, Intent-Based Swaps & The Future of Cross-Chain Trading

Anna George — co-founder & CEO of CowSwap/Cow Protocol (Gnosis → spun out in 2022) — joined me for a conversation that’s half origin story, half product/market reality check.
We start with her pre-crypto chapter: years of global humanitarian and UN work, including time in Rwanda, and then the moment where the bureaucracy/slow pace stopped feeling like “impact” and started feeling like quicksand. That’s what pushed her into Ethereum in 2017, right as the ecosystem was taking shape.

From there, we go deep on how CowSwap happened for real: multiple DEX attempts, big lessons learned (UX matters, liquidity matters, shipping MVPs matters), and what finally made CowSwap click — intent-based trading, protection from MEV games like sandwiching/front-running, and the big user win: if your trade fails, you’re not lighting gas money on fire.

We finish with what they’re building now: cross-chain Cow (making cross-chain trading feel like one flow), the direction they’re going with a unified cross-chain engine, the recent Aave collaboration (collateral swaps in one interaction), and why UX is still the #1 bottleneck if this industry actually wants the next wave of users.

00:00 Intro: Anna George (CowSwap / Cow Protocol)
02:04 From humanitarian + UN work to crypto (why she left)
08:11 Learning Mandarin, living abroad, and the “impact” mindset
10:06 Inside the UN: bureaucracy, incentives, and frustration
15:10 2017 Ethereum era: first exposure + jumping into crypto
16:33 Joining Gnosis early: prediction markets → need for better trading
21:05 Early DEX failures (incl. the 6-hour auction UX problem)
24:23 The breakthrough: intent-based trading + solver ecosystem
32:05 MEV, failed trades, and why CowSwap took off
37:25 What’s next: cross-chain Cow + Aave integration + smart orders