AMA RECAP with Pluto (9R)
Pluto(from Nine Realms) came to THORChain Telegram to answer some community questions and to give an update on THORChain’s progress and roadmap. Below are all the details of it!
Pluto (9R): Let’s go ahead and kick things off. My name is Pluto, and I’m an engineer at Nine Realms (9R). We’ve been working on THORChain since May 2021 as developers, evangelists and operators of the network. We’re relatively new compared to the core team, who have been working on the project for a little over 3 years now. I’m here to answer your questions about the project.
Go ahead and fire away. I’ll try to answer as many as I can.
Q: I’ll start it off, how is Luna integration going good sir?
Ans. Hey. The majority of the code was developed last month (Feb). It took a bit longer than other chains (like DOGE, which we delivered in January) because we wanted to make sure the chain integration would be easily replicable to other chains like CosmosHub (ATOM) and others. Over the past 2 weeks, we had been waiting for TerraSCV to finish their audit. The findings will be released later this week. In short, there were no critical vulnerability. As of now, Terra is the next release slated after the hardfork of chaosnet.
Q: Pluto, Last year, I talked Brokkr and they said there was going to be synthetic rune also with synths. It didn’t happen, do you know why? Thanks.
Ans. RUNE is already a native token on the THORChain network. There’s no reason you’d need synthetic RUNE, since you can already interact with all synthetics with native RUNE. For IBC, synthetic rune isn’t needed either. This must have been a misunderstanding.
Q: Pluto, people (like Coinbureau) are very confused about TC’s security. Can you give an overview of all the live steps TC is taking to secure the network
Ans. I think it boils down to the a few things:
- Security natively baked into the protocol via the RUNE asset. RUNE both secures the value of the assets held in pool by nodes bonded to the network (in balanced state, 2:1) and is the asset paired with every token deposited by LPs (1:1). Giving it a total of 3 RUNE for every 1 RUNE worth of asset deposited. I can follow up with an explanation what this means for RUNE’s value as “3x TVL” more in depth later.
- THORSec, which is our red-team, constantly working to break the protocol in testnet/stagenent as well as auditing every line of code that goes into THORNode. They bring some of the best experience in blockchain security, giving us round-the-clock coverage.
- ImmuneFi for bug disclosures and bounties
- 9R working on network resiliency and improving decentralization of the network
- “Chain guardians” which are security pros within each community of projects we integrate with thorchain. They give us a deeper understanding of the security implications of new integrations, since we cannot possibly be experts in all the projects we hope to integrate.
Q: I have heard some confusion amongst people regarding throughput between 100 nodes and 120 nodes. Is there a difference in protocol performance between these two values since asgard vaults support 40 nodes each?
Ans. We can’t know until we’ve done the appropriate load testing. THORChain is tested up to 100 nodes. As such, we’re recommending to stop adding new nodes at this point until we’ve had time to properly load test more nodes. This also involves addressing a couple outstanding performance issues that may compound if we don’t do something about them first. Standard tech debt. The network has responded very well to scaling to 99 nodes (which was achieved last night). Once we feel confident in scaling to more nodes, we’ll issue a recommendation to node operators, who are ultimately in control of voting for this setting.
Q: If a time comes and only Native Rune exists and only Thorchain has Native Rune, then how will new people be able to do swaps needing Rune for transactions?
Ans. Great question. The fee is subtracted from the amount you swap in. For example, if you send 1 BTC, your swap in amount is calculated as .9999 (or whatever, subtract 0.02 RUNE worth of BTC). The beauty of Thorchain is that you don’t need to hold RUNE to use it. You can swap your native asset for RUNE anytime you’d like to acquire some, but it’s not strictly required, i.e. you can swap ETH/BTC without even having a THORChain address.
Q: If you have your BTC on an exchange, you need to get it to your own wallet first and then you can LP?
Ans. Yes, never transfer directly from an exchange to a THORChain LP. This would technically “belong” to the exchange. Always send to a multicoin wallet first, like Trust or XDefi or Ledger.
Q: I heard Haven devs submitted to have Haven integrated. If all goes well with Luna, do you have a guessimation for when Haven could be tackled?
Ans. After LUNA is shipped, I will immediately turn my attention to 1) testing the cosmos chain client with CosmosHub and 2) adding Haven to stagenet. If everything goes smoothly it could be the very next chain being added after Terra.
Q: Saw the coinbureau video today and besides terra I noticed a lot of integrations on the roadmap which seem very small. Zcash etc. Why isn’t effort focusing on the largest chains first?
Ans. ZEC is more or less stalled at this time. We could easily add it, but my priorities are ATOM and XHV. Eridanus (9R) is working on the Avalanche migration, so those are like the next 3.
Q: Could you talk about IL and ILP. What it means for people maybe short term to long term? Does it compound?
Ans. ILP is a very complex topic that has been written about extensively. I’d direct them to LPU or this article:
Q: Any news on aggregators?
Ans. Aggregators are the the feature I am most excited about for THORChain. This tweet demonstrates a proof-of-concept of aggregation. In one tx, we are able to swap ASTRO to LUNA on AstroPort and and LUNA to DOGE on THORChain. We plan to do this for ETH, AVAX and Terra ecosystems at first, meaning any DEX on any of those platforms can swap into or out of BTC, DOGE, XHV, etc. using a single transaction. The composability of multichain DEXs is about to explode and part of 9Rs role is to connect all of those dots across ecosystems. This time next year, it will be status quo for DEXs to support more tokens than just the ecosystem they were built on. For example, people will be swapping BTC on AstroPort and using cross-chain liquidity infrastructure like THORChain to facilitate it. https://twitter.com/Pluto9r/status/1494067705686761477
Q: My understanding is that Monero is difficult to integrate on TC because it has too small a memo size. Do you think the devs will be able to workaround this to get it to work on TC?
Ans. Yes, with the release of THORNames, we can squeeze it into the memo, allowing chains like Monero. THORNames will go live sometime in the next month or so.
Q: When is Nine Realms offering services like “community” nodes for people whom don’t have the expertise to run a node but want to participate. And sorry in advance if “community node” is not proper verbiage.
Ans. I don’t think we will offer something like that anytime soon. We currently have more inbound than we can handle from whales wanting to stake on one of our nodes. We’d like to see the network become more decentralized and community nodes are anti-thetical to that. I would like to the “bond provider” feature being used more, with mini DAOs of groups with trust bonding up their own nodes.
Q: Thoryield down ? Any other place to track LP shares?
Ans. Check out https://apeboard.finance/dashboard. THORChain LPs were just added
Q: Pluto, Solana’s blockchain, I understand, is enormous and growing quickly. Chad B thinks it is too expensive to integrate on TC. What are your thoughts on this?
Ans. Yeah, I agree. Solana is a beast. It’s not truly decentralized and is owned by a bunch of whales (VCs). I don’t think it’s a good fit for THORChain until they can figure out how to make it more decentralzied.
Q: How does a 50/50 deposit BTC + RUNE work with the ledger at Thorswap? as an example let’s take 100 RUNE. the second part should be filled with BTC equivalent to 100 RUNE.
Ans. Exactly, 50 RUNE worth of BTC + 50 RUNE = symmetrical position that will earn you yield on trades done in the BTC pool against ANY asset.
So unlike most AMMs where you only earn yield on trades done in that pair, because RUNE backs every pool, any trade going from any asset to/from the pool you are an LP in earns you yield.
Q: Maybe a nice idea to launch Viking NFT images on the thorchain blockchain?
Ans. No NFTs on THORChain. We are critical, cross-chain liquidity infrastructure. Smart contracts and JPEG art don’t belong on THORChain (but other projects and protocols with these characteristics may leverage THORChain for liquidity).
Q: If someone wants to here the latest regarding Thorchain development, where are some good resources?
Ans.Check out the “DevUpdate” series here https://medium.com/@THORChain_Author
Q: Pluto, For future integration of valuable chains, even if work has been done on integration, does it make sense for TC to move forward on a chain if the community hasn’t shown any interest? Like Cardano, big chain but I don’t see interest in TC from its community.
Ans. Nope it doesn’t make sense. Anyone can open a PR, we may even merge the PR, but it’s entirely up to node operators to decide whether to activate new chains. Thus, communities and projects must appeal directly to THORChain node operators to convince them to add a project.
9R can act as conduit for this. We often make a recommendation to node operators for what we believe is best for the long-term growth of the project.
Q: I have a lot of people whom are very excited and want to help Thorchain to succeed. What are some things the average user of Thorchain can do to promote its success?
- Add LPs and grow the TVL of thorchain
- Swap and generate fees for LPs
- Get your communites interested and involved.
If your favorite project is top 50 and not on thorchain, now is a good time to begin evangelizing THORChain and drumming up interest in having them added to the ONLY truly decentralized, cross-chain liquidity AMM in existence.
Q: Pluto, can you share an overview on how IBC works (maybe on a transactional level)?
Ans. IBC is a mechanism of all CosmosSDK-based chains that allows them to beam tokens between blockchains using relayers. There is exploratory work being done to determine how that could benefit both THORChain and ecosystems we’re integrated with. I can’t really tell you much more as it’s not my area of expertise.
What IBC would enable is allowing RUNE to be represented on any other Cosmos-based blockchain (like CosmosHub). I’m not really sure though why you’d want that, but that’s for people other than me to figure out
Q: Wouldnt it also be great if synth btc could be traded on osmosis and astroport?
Ans. Why not just use Astroport as an aggregator to thorchain and trade for native BTC or synthetic BTC on thorchain? What would the use be of beaming synth BTC to Terra, for example?
Q: We noticed a lot of use of synthetics. I think it was around 20 million yesterday. Has the synthetic introduction going well so far? Any found bugs/issues?
Ans. Very well. Shattered my expectations tbh. We’re seeing about 20% daily volume as synths, that’s huge and validates it as a way to efficiently arb pools.
Q: When can synths be increased?
Ans. When node operators decide to. need to some analysis on real-world chaosnet data regarding synth risk exposure but we should be able to issue a recommendation on it soon
Folks, thanks for all the questions. That’s about all I have time for today. Hope this was useful for you all. I hope to do another one soon! Thanks for your continued support and interest in THORChain.
Thank you for your great questions and thanks to Dennis for moderating.
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