THORChain (RUNE) Monthly Report September 2020
THORChain had a very busy month in development and finally launched Chaosnet with 11 node operators.
THORChain community, The Warriors, had reasons for celebration and excitement when issues were encountered (the clue is in the name… Chaosnet), but as always, hats off to the team for their exemplary transparency and ability to handle any incoming hurdles!
Development
The team and community have spent the majority of September continuing to build out and mature the infrastructure around THORChain:
- BEPSwap trading competition — the comp will run for a month (beginning tomorrow) to allow enough time for the community to build bot infrastructure.
- 5M RUNE Fund Cap
- 25 Active Nodes (7 Standby)
- 21 Active Pools
- BEPSwap Pool Ownership Issue and Fix — The community and team found an issue relating to pool ownership and reduced the CAP on the network to prevent further issues. The root cause was liquidity units were being incorrectly allocated during asymmetrical liquidity events.
Other Tech Milestones
ASGARDEX-DESKTOP V0.0.3-alpha.1
Building for desktop is a lot more difficult but necessary for professional users, bitcoin-native users who are wary of the internet, and being censorship-resistant.
The team is excited to release V0.0.3 which now supports BTC, ETH, and BNB wallet management, as well as BNB swapping.
V14 was Deployed to Testnet and Chaosnet
V14 was released successfully to both nets and work continues to prepare for the upcoming Bitcoin testnet.
Marketing & Community
Delphi Defi Dashboard
Now showing better UI around churning, as well as solvency checks.
THORChain Network Explorer
Now showing pricing information for metrics and more tweaks.
The team also announced the launch of both community made Telegram and Twitter Bots.
Telegram Bot
The Bot now sends a Churn Notification on a successful churn:
Twitter Bot
Now showing total capital on the network.
With regards to “Traditional Marketing” —
“Right now the THORChain team and Community need to focus on building. Execution is everything. Multi-chain this side of Christmas is achievable with laser-focus.”
Enough said.
Network Stats
Staking
As THORChain is not in Mainnet, the most relevant usage metric at the moment is the RUNEVault staking activity, which pays out 700,000 RUNE between all holders every week. This amounts to roughly 28% per year for participants this month, reducing to 27% in October.
The generous yield is also a key factor for the extremely high (ca 90%) staking rate of RUNE. Below is a graph of the trend in # of addresses staking and the total amount of RUNE staked throughout 2020.
Token Distribution
Below is a graph of the historical # of RUNE holders since November, as well as the total RUNE held by the top 100. The maximum # of Nodes a single holder can run is now at 14, which is the Bitmax staking wallet. This would potentially give the exchange 19% of the network, which is still far below the 51% threshold to attempt to compromise the network.
The team has previously set a goal to have 99 holders with 67% of the supply at Mainnet. This would mean that the ownership is distributed, but a large number of nodes can still be run and the optimal split of 2–1 bonded-staked rune is followed.
RUNE Token Release Schedule
Currently, only the RUNEVault incentive is being released into the supply and the team has stopped OTC sales as they have almost 3 years of runway (up from 2 years last month). The massive extension in runway length is from the appreciation of the company-reserve RUNE tokens.
As per the original plan, the Team and Seed investor tokens will begin unlocking 20% every 3 months upon Mainnet release. This amounts to 10M and 5.2M RUNE respectively every 3 months.
Bull vs Bear
Bull
As more and more RUNE is locked in the system, the value of RUNE moves from speculative to deterministic. Multi-chain Chaosnet is the next step in realizing this transition.
With regards to TA, we are seeing a very strong case for a falling wedge on the 1D timeframe. The Falling Wedge is a bullish pattern that begins wide at the top and contracts as prices move lower. With talk of Bitcoin Testnet now in the works, there could be some short term expectations from traders and investors alike of a potential breakout from the current falling wedge.
Bear
As previously mentioned, the tokenization of Bitcoin on Ethereum has had explosive growth in the last couple of months, and with the growing trade volume of tokenized Bitcoin on decentralized exchanges, this jeopardizes the first-mover advantage THORChain would have had by launching the first Bitcoin AMM pool.
Therefore, the longer THORChain takes to launch a fully functional Bitcoin pool the more users will get accustomed to using tokenized Bitcoin. This can create a bear case where Bitcoin users will not see the unique value proposition as attractive anymore when THORChain fully launches.
The opinions expressed during the Bull vs Bear series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of Multi.io and its employees. The goal is to present a view from both sides of the market.
Upcoming News & Events
Having reached the highly anticipated Chaosnet, Multi-chain Chaosnet is next on the ever exciting RUNE roadmap.
We expect a lot of vigorous testing before this with various rounds of increased staking limits and amount of node operators.
The team is targeting a release this side of Christmas for Multi-chain Chaosnet, so fingers crossed on that front.
Information & Data Sources
BEPSwap Pool Ownership Issue and Fix
