THORChain Community Products
Exploring community built products on THORChain
Overview
A thriving developer community has emerged around THORChain over the past 12 months as the product has come to life. These individuals share a passion for cross-chain and are eager to see the THORChain vision realized.
Expertise is diverse, from blockchain engineers & cryptographers; to golang guns & React gurus. Highly engaged and with deep subject matter expertise, the community are collaborating & self-organizing daily; sharing thoughts & ideas as products come to life all from within a simple telegram channel.
Some of these engineers are now fully funded by the THORChain treasury with and will continue building on THORChain for years to come.
The team recently reached out to some of these individuals and teams to learn more about the products and what inspired them to build around THORChain. Let’s explore the products one by one…
THORChain Explorer — Pusher Labs
Team background/overview
(introduce yourself, give some insight into the team & what you stand for)
We’re a small Tokyo-based team. Our focus is building open source projects in the blockchain area that encourage community participation, promote transparency, and lower the bar for the average user to interact with the groundbreaking tech emerging in this space.
Your best (short) elevator pitch for this product
(problem space, what the product does, why it’s important)
The THORChain Explorer is an open source, community-driven way to easily interact with the data you need from the THORChain network.
How does this add value to the THORChain & community?
(eg. why is it valuable/integral, what does it mean if it didn’t exist?)
We help provide network transparency for the community. There are countless use-cases for searching across network data. From summaries like 24 hour volume, to deeper data, like how many slash points a node has accrued, each user brings their own use-case to the table. What we’re working to do is to make that as frictionless as possible.
What was the motivation for you to build on/around THORChain?
(your team could have worked on many things, why thorchain? why this?)
Name a better team working on decentralized cross-chain asset swaps.
What does the long term vision/roadmap look like?
(high level vision & dot point high level roadmap)
Ultimately, our plan is to provide more flexibility for users to engage with the network. Expanding platforms so users can connect with THORChain with as much ease as possible, and offering tools beyond the THORChain Explorer. As the community grows and THORChain evolves, we will too.
What do you enjoy about working with the THORChain community?
(what’s your experience so far?)
I always liked how the core team valued anonymity to emphasize that this is a project the community should drive. And the community has been great! Right from the get-go, when I was digging into some of the APIs, people were eager to answer any questions. It’s really clear that community members play an integral part in making code contributions, suggesting improvements, and offering positive feedback, not just in the Explorer, but in all aspects of THORChain.
DeFi Dashboard ft. THORChain — Delphi Digital
https://defi.delphidigital.io/thorchain/chaosnet
Team background/overview
(introduce yourself, give some insight into the team & what you stand for)
We are a research-driven firm dedicated to advancing the understanding and development of the growing digital asset market. Our subscribers leverage our team’s research to uncover actionable opportunities within the space.
Disclaimer: Delphi Ventures and members of the Delphi Digital team own RUNE
Your best (short) elevator pitch for this product
(problem space, what the product does, why it’s important)
Our dashboard aims to give stakers and node operators insight into the project’s status, such as which nodes are expected to churn in and out, how much RUNE is required to bond, current yields for stakers and node operators, incentive pendulum, network solvency and so on.
Ultimately we intend to extend the dashboard to other projects in the DeFi space so that the community can see the same key traction metrics vs other AMMs that our analysts use to inform our decisions about the space.
How does this add value to the THORChain & community?
(eg. why is it valuable/integral, what does it mean if it didn’t exist?)
We hope the dashboard will spread awareness about the THORchain project plus be a useful tool to community members, LPs and node operators alike to inform their decisions and understanding of the project.
What was the motivation for you to build on/around THORChain?
(your team could have worked on many things, why thorchain? why this?)
We were early supporters and believers in THORchain, having published a report for our institutional subscribers in Dec 2019 and continuously being in contact with the team trying to help however we can, with this app being one aspect of that.
What does the long term vision/roadmap look like?
(high level vision & dot point high level roadmap)
Our goal is to give the community access to the same metrics we look at when reasoning about THORchain and its position in the DeFi space.
* Add other AMMs for comparison
* Show real current yields for different pools
* Show key metrics vs other projects such as TVL, volume, fees etc
What do you enjoy about working with the THORChain community?
(what’s your experience so far?)
The community understands the potential of THORchain and it feels like everyone pushes in the same direction for it to succeed. Also the team is very skilled and encouraging, which is important while working away on a product.
We love that it’s fully open source and decentralised and not owned by any one central company, but instead effectively owned, governed and ultimately maintained by the community.
THORChain Block Explorer —Viewblock
https://viewblock.io/thorchain
Team background/overview
(introduce yourself, give some insight into the team & what you stand for)
We are a small team with diverse technical backgrounds that include device drivers, firmware, and data visualization. Two years ago, we embarked on the ambitious journey to create a fully featured, blockchain-agnostic explorer with an emphasis on user-experience. Today, we are the main explorer for multiple blockchains, two of which are in the top 100 market cap.
Your best (short) elevator pitch for this product
(problem space, what the product does, why it’s important)
The THORChain ViewBlock explorer is a fully-featured, top-down explorer that offers a detailed insight into the THORChain network. Users will be able to view data of all layers of THORChain, from raw blockchain data to historical aggregation of DeFi metrics.
How does this add value to the THORChain & community?
(eg. why is it valuable/integral, what does it mean if it didn’t exist?)
We believe that allowing people to search and discover the full extent of the data on-chain is primordial not only for the lambda THORChain user who desires to consult their own history, but more importantly to the overall openness and verifiability of the chain.
What was the motivation for you to build on/around THORChain?
(your team could have worked on many things, why thorchain? why this?)
In their own ways, THORChain and ViewBlock share the common goal of bridging multiple chains together. Building an explorer for one of the leaders in cross-chain DeFi is not only beneficial for the bigger DeFi ecosystem, but also to our blockchain-agnostic vision. It just makes sense.
What does the long term vision/roadmap look like?
(high level vision & dot point high level roadmap)
The current THORCHAIN ViewBlock explorer is only in alpha version. We have bigger plans to expand on the features which include more statistics & charts, in-depth views of liquidity pools & vaults, and much more. Be sure to stay tuned!
What do you enjoy about working with the THORChain community?
(what’s your experience so far?)
Our interactions have mostly been directly with the THORChain team so far, as we have been heads down building. As we continue to roll out new features, we hope the community will have feedback and suggestions. We can always be reached at contact@viewblock.io.
XDEFI Browser Extension — XDEFI
Team background/overview
(introduce yourself, give some insight into the team & what you stand for)
We are currently a team of three working on XDEFI and we will soon expand our team. David, our Tech Lead, has been in Blockchain engineering since 2016, contributed to Metamask and took part to various projects, working with Ethereum and DFINITY. Andy is a full-stack developer, with amazing front-end abilities and a long experience in software engineering. I am the project lead (Emile), I started my career working as an equity analyst in an investment fund back in 2013 and then worked at Bloomberg for a little while before joining the start-up world and bringing several projects to market.
Your best (short) elevator pitch for this product
(problem space, what the product does, why it’s important)
The DeFi ecosystem has been rapidly attracting liquidity and was mainly built around Ethereum. We are now seeing multiple projects with strong value propositions emerging on other chains. Cross-chain DeFi is ineluctably going to be big and infrastructures need to be built around it. We have created an extension that not only support tokens from any chains but also allows users to connect to their favourite DeFi dApps.
What was the motivation for you to build on/around THORChain?
(your team could have worked on many things, why thorchain? why this?)
We are not built around THORChain per say as we are independent and aim to interact with any projects. However, the team members of XDEFI are all long-term supporters of the project and it was really important for us to contribute to the community efforts in building the future ecosystem around THORChain.
What does the long term vision/roadmap look like?
(high level vision & dot point high level roadmap)
The ambition of the team is to be on the browser of every DeFi users. We are building a secure, fast and simple to use wallet so that users can interact with any dApps seamlessly and safely store assets irrespectively of their native chain.
What do you enjoy about working with the THORChain community?
(what’s your experience so far?)
Man.. Where do I start.. We have been in Blockchain for a long time and rarely seen such an outstanding community and core team. It is incredible what we are seeing right now, the selflessness of the community, the velocity of the core team, their vision.. Being able to contribute to the development of this ecosystem is humbling and we are immensely grateful to the core team for their amazing support.
THORNode Bot — Block 42
https://t.me/thornode_bot
Team background/overview
(introduce yourself, give some insight into the team & what you stand for)
We are a team based in Graz, Austria focused on developing projects on various blockchain networks. We envision a world of shared prosperity and are working on projects and with networks that fit that goal, THORChain being one of them. block42 was founded in the year 2018 focusing exclusively on blockchain technology, in the last two years of existence we have been rapidly expanding and currently have thirteen members. We believe that blockchain has a lot of potential in improving some outdated systems and bring more opportunities to people regardless of their status.
Your best (short) elevator pitch for this product
(problem space, what the product does, why it’s important)
Military has radars to alert itself about incoming attacks, Thornode providers have the THORNode Bot to alert themselves about incoming slash points. THORNode Bot provides easy to read information and alerts through telegram about the status of the node.
How does this add value to the THORChain & community?
(eg. why is it valuable/integral, what does it mean if it didn’t exist?)
Keeping the network secure is a job for the node providers, to do so they need to monitor their nodes to see the status of them and keep them running smoothly. It is crucial for the network as if too many nodes would fail without their managers keeping track of it and fixing the problems, the whole THORChain network could crash. This is true for any blockchain network as the nodes are the basic layer that needs to be securely established. THORnode Bot helps node providers keeping the network running securely and smoothly.
What was the motivation for you to build on/around THORChain?
(your team could have worked on many things, why thorchain? why this?)
THORChain is an amazing project that is a true cross chain DEX. We believe that cross chain solutions will be a necessity for the future development of blockchain. This will allow different project with different goals to be interconnected and bring new possibilities that were cut off before because there was no bridge between them. The way THORChain is set up, we see a lot of potential for its growth in the future.
block42 is a node provider and has to deal with keeping the node running smoothly. We saw the need for a tool that would monitor the node and alert us whenever needed, this reduces the amount of time that is needed to be dedicated to the node and also increases efficiency of detecting errors as well as allowing us to solve them faster. We think a tool like this is not only useful for us but for all node providers and it also helps the network to be more secure.
What does the long term vision/roadmap look like?
(high level vision & dot point high level roadmap)
While the THORNode bot is functional we are still working on it to provide a stable, reliable and easy to use alert bot. We are looking to bring the best alert system for node monitoring that can be used for all the nodes. Additional features will be implemented depending on the future needs of the network.
What do you enjoy about working with the THORChain community?
(what’s your experience so far?)
We really like the responsiveness from the core team and that they see the needs for an ecosystem to be evolved around such a project. We also really appreciate the constant updates on every possible matter ensures that the community is informed what is happening with the THORChain regardless of the size of the update. Also the community has been really passionate and really active, helping anyone with the issues they might come across.
THORChain Hammer Bot —Mehow
https://twitter.com/THORChainHammer
Team background/overview
(introduce yourself, give some insight into the team & what you stand for)
Hey I’m MehowBrains, a pseudoanon THORChain community member. I’ve been public about my THORChain $RUNE position since October 2019 (although I’ve been vested since July 2019).
In the past I’ve developed search text advertising tech which perfected relevancy between intents, ads and landing pages shown. As you may understand, when you build a data-centric advertising tech which computes millions of queries and automatically marries them to generated unique ads, you get a good sense of the concept of relevance when solving objectives.
Rather than having a core team, I’ve always identified talent to help me solve critical tasks for each objective. This allowed me to build quality products as I didn’t fit the person into the task, but rather the task to the right person.
Today I manage a crypto portfolio and try to use my skills, tools and relationships to fill voids in projects I think solve-for product/market-fit (and have a shot at attaining goals).
I stand for collaborative, fair and shared efforts.
Your best (short) elevator pitch for this product
(problem space, what the product does, why it’s important)
While I was educating about THORChain publicly on Twitter, I realized that the same questions kept coming up. I knew that I had answered them in the past to someone else, so I figured that instead of scrolling through my tweets or making sheets of saved tweet links, there was an opportunity to tweet not only my content, but also the team and community’s content easily without having to look for tweets.
I decided to build a bot which organizes content/links — and allows me to share content by just tweeting a simple command i.e. @THORChainHammer emissions (it would reply with the THORChain emission schedule). Think of it like an “on-demand” website.
How does this add value to the THORChain & community?
(eg. why is it valuable/integral, what does it mean if it didn’t exist?)
It allowed me or any other member of the community to become educators. All they had to do was to memorize a few common commands, and every time they’d stumble on a tweet where it was relevant to share, they’d just tweet a command and the bot would reply with the content.
I see way too many crypto promoters quite frankly wasting their time. They repeat the same stuff everyday in a different way. What’s the point? If the old content is relevant and answers the question/intent, then why not re-use it? It didn’t change after all didn’t it?
I also noticed that many tools which the team invested towards weren’t being used i.e. they hired an agency to produce a high quality explainer video about THORChain. It was mentioned once when released, and never again after. What a total waste. By organizing that video as a tweet and command in my bot, I had an easy way to access it and use it as an introduction to Twitter users inquiring about THORChain for the first time.
IMO Twitter serves as a much better traffic driver to project content than any beautifully crafted website. With Twitter you forget about design, fancy animations — and focus on what matters most: driving traffic from relevant eyes (which Twitter has a ton). Unless your website taps into a high traffic channel (and you drive the traffic), it serves no better purpose than a floating flyer on the side of a road. Staple that flyer to high traffic storefronts, signs, t-shirts — and you’ve got yourself a good marketing vehicle. With my bot, you’re holding the stapler and get to staple the flyer onto anything you feel relevant. It’s helped me amass over 940,000 impressions in July 2020 (updated stats), which I think is quite astonishing for the fact that the THORChain ecosystem is a fraction of the Ethereum’s.
The bot is open-source, anyone can use for their own project/brand: https://github.com/thorchaincommunity/command-bot
What was the motivation for you to build on/around THORChain?
(your team could have worked on many things, why thorchain? why this?)
I simply wanted to find a faster way to educate so that RUNE can become the settlement asset of crypto and beyond. We can’t attain any of that without an educated community, but we can attain it if the community has tools to exponentially multiply the effect. Have you noticed that projects with engaged communities outperform heavily funded projects?
What does the long term vision/roadmap look like?
(high level vision & dot point high level roadmap)
The bot is fairly complete, it supports multiple Twitter-based admins which can manage content by DM’ing the bot. Aside from that, it boasts a few other features if the operator of the bot wishes to engage the community into specific tasks / roles.
If I was to ask for an ideal version of the bot, it would automatically “listen-for” mentions of “THORChain” or “RUNE” (or other relevant) mentions / keywords, and report them back to followers (THORChain community), which would then help answer the query via a custom or command-based reply. I’d just look at making it smarter in whichever way I think may help THORChain attain its goals.
What do you enjoy about working with the THORChain community?
(what’s your experience so far?)
I enjoy the diversity of talent in the community. We’ve got varying levels of expertise segmented into different groups/channels. You’ve got the devs in the Telegram Dev channel, the support community in the main Telegram channel, the forward thinkers on Twitter. Support is everywhere, and in general the community is very warm and welcoming. We all know the end goal and how to attain it, and I think that’s what makes the community most enjoyable.
Other notable products
New products are being built around THORChain every day. Developers respond swiftly to suggestions & requests from the community for various tools and products. A few notable ones are shown below.
THORChain Help — https://thorchain.help
A community run ELI5 version of https://docs.thorchain.org to help non-technical users understand THORChain.
Chaosnet Leaderboard — https://leaderboard.thornode.org
A leaderboard for chaosnet trading accounts. The winners of the trading competition will be chosen from here.
Pool Pricing Calculator — http://bepswapsimulator.info/
Simple tool to assist with calculating pool prices on THORChain.
RUNE Stake Calculator — https://runestake.info/
Calculates staking rewards for a given staker address.
Where to start?
The best place to start building on THORChain is to become active in the community. Most products begin as conversations on telegram so be sure to join https://t.me/thorchain_org and https://t.me/thorchain_dev & get active!
The following resources are essential reading. Once you have the basic understanding simply build & ship small proof of concepts; if there’s interest from the community the rest will be history.
Community
To keep up to date, please monitor community channels, particularly Telegram and Twitter:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/thorchain_org
- Telegram Community: https://t.me/thorchain_org
- Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/thorchain
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/thorchain
- Github: https://github.com/thorchain
- Medium: https://medium.com/thorchain
