THORCHAIN — ONE YEAR MILESTONE

52 weeks of continuous THORChain weekly dev updates

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THORChain

9 min readJul 21, 2020

The THORChain team are excited to have released the latest weekly dev update, marking 52 weeks of consistent updates to the community. To celebrate this milestone this blog will explore the past, present and future of THORChain.

THORChain Primer

Humble origins

THORChain was conceptualized in 2018 by a team participating in a Binance dexathon which became as a research project soon thereafter. Made possible via some early investment and development with some key partners, work began on the first decentralized liquidity network proof-of-concept.

The following six months of R&D showed promise for what THORChain could become, a truly blockchain agnostic liquidity protocol enabling assets to be swapped across always-on incentivized liquidity pools; but efforts were put on pause in late 2018 to await for the launch of Cosmos SDK — the main tech stack of the project.

The team watched on as Uniswap launched in November 2018 and began slowly absorbing liquidity from the market. The team witnessed the emergence of DeFi on Ethereum and remained steadfast in the belief that THORChain would bring DeFi to the cross-chain environment.

Everything changed in 2019 with a working implementation of the GG18 TSS scheme released by KZen, and as Tendermint & Cosmos SDK also displayed signs of maturity.

The team had three key moments of epiphany:

TSS allows a chain-agnostic bridging solutoin
1-way state pegs forego the need for pegged tokens
A coupled bonding + liquidity asset makes security scalable

A new beginning — TSS and 1-way state pegs

With a renewed sense of purpose and convinced in the viability of the product, the team raised a small amount of seed funding to bring shape to THORChain; and in June 2019 the team showcased a working proof-of-concept at the Cosmos hackathon in Berlin, namely instaswap. The product’s feasibility, viability and desirability were validated and efforts ramped up to formally initiate the project.

BEPSwap, the projects first go-to-market product was announced on July 10, describing a semi-trusted setup using a 3/4 Threshold Signature Scheme enabling BEP2 asset swaps on Binance Chain.

The THORChain Initial Dex Offering (IDO) announcement followed on July 17 and only days later 20m RUNE was offered on Binance Dex at a starting price of 3.2c. Across the sales and IDO, $1.5m was raised. The project were sufficiently funded.

RUNEVault launched within days of the IDO, which would become an important tool for community engagement and for RUNE’s value & distribution. The team had no idea how successful this rudimentary incentivized staking mechanism would become in 2020.

Weekly dev updates

The first Weekly Dev Update was published on July 29 2019 describing four streams of work:

Cosmos-powered SDK StateChain
Cross-chain infrastructure
Threshold Signature Scheme implementation
Front-end Integration for BEPSwap

The fundamental ethos for THORChain’s engineering team was cemented within this update and the team entered a social contract to practice radical transparency.

To the extent possible, all code would be developed in the open, supported by development updates with zero opacity. This philosophy was soon adopted across the board with THORChain’s first treasury report made public just a few months later.

Since the first Weekly Dev Update, the team have remained consistent in this approach, releasing dev updates without fail each & every week; disclosing as much as practically possible about the project including hiring, investment and even risks.

The transparency initiative hasn’t gone unnoticed, with the project seeing positive press from all over and receiving Binance’s V Label verification in addition to being featured in an academic paper on blockchain project transparency. The feedback has reaffirmed the team’s commitment to the community to be open, transparent; and ethical & morally responsible at all times.

Major achievements outside of the core THORChain product include:

BEPSwap — Interface for swapping BEP2 assets on Binance Chain (Chaosnet)
Midgard — API for consuming data from THORChain
Byzantine Module — JavaScript anti-phishing module for active THORNodes
Asgardex Common — A range of JS libraries for building on THORChain
Asgard Wallet — The future multicoin wallet & interface for THORChain
Successful Audits from Certik, Kudelski and Gauntlet on the codebase and economic architecture.

Where are we now?

The release of Testnet v4 last week is the culmination of more than 2 years research and 12+ months of active development on emerging information technologies such as threshold signature scheme cryptography, byzantine fault tolerant networks and deep game theory & economic incentive design.

While the initial vision for THORChain hasn’t changed, the nature of the blockchain and DeFi space has required the team to adapt and refine plans along the way — for example shifting to the Binance TSS Library. It’s been no easy feat and despite shifting a few goal posts; the team have finally delivered into the hands of future THORNode operators.

For the first time, the community is able to participate in a network of nodes who will, in the future secure billions of dollars in crypto assets. This is the public verification & validation the team have been looking forward to for some time.

The next few weeks will be the litmus test for Chaosnet as the team adapt & refine the THORNode software based on “in the wild” observations. While no significant changes are expected, the team want to make sure all quality expectations are met; as the ability to influence outcomes will immediately diminish after exiting this phase.

The holy grail of cross-chain liquidity

THORChain’s current state architecture is fit-for-purpose for cross chain, however the delta between Chaosnet & Mainnet from a readiness perspective is not insignificant. Several streams of work are in progress and detailed below:

Chaosnet

Chaosnet is the first mainnet demonstration of THORChain’s capabilities and will provide insight into the mechanics of the network in preparation for cross-chain later this year.

The developer community will use this time to build products around THORChain, including telegram bots, trading bots, DeFi dashboards and more. Further grants will be made to any team with a clear product value proposition.

Chaosnet will also serve as a persistent security bounty, incentivizing users to attack the network for their economic advantage. It’s during this time the liquidity cap will gradually be lifted as confidence grows.

Cross Chain

Bitcoin & Ethereum integration will continue in parallel to Chaosnet as refinements are made to the network based on data & insights gained from Chaosnet. As soon as practical the first cross-chain testnet will be released.

Given the network has been engineered to be cross-chain from the ground up, this isn’t expected to be a significant undertaking; however quality testing is always an uncertainty.

ASGARDEX

ASGARDEX is the flagship product and will continue to evolve, heading toward the crucial Minimum Usable Product enabling users to create a single wallet for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Binance chain; and being able to stake & swap those assets right from within the wallet.

Wallets of the future, like ASGARDEX and Frontier will provide permissionless liquidity staking, yield farming & swapping as mandatory features; or face rapid decline of users. To this extent the team are building out a protocol-level trustless revenue scheme for Wallets and Exchanges to easily adopt. For the first time, wallets might be able to sustainably attract revenue without selling out their users and stay open-source.

Developer SDKs

Libraries such as asgardex-common will be iteratively & incrementally built out to make it easy to build on & around THORChain. Once the JS reference implementations reach MVP, bounties will be put up for porting these SDKs to other languages eg. Swift, Objective C, Java etc. These efforts will further catalyze the developer ecosystem necessary for THORChain’s long term success.

GG20 Upgrade

While Binance Chain Chaosnet will continue to utilise the GG18 TSS implementation, multi chain will require an upgrade to GG20 TSS as described in this blog from earlier this month. The upgrade improves performance and enhances ability to blame nodes.

When mainnet?

The disruptive & embryonic technology on which THORChain is based generates highly complex integration challenges. Teams who failed to approach these challenges appropriately in the past have suffered catastrophic consequences.

THORChain is a zero-to-one moment and ushers in a paradigm shift in cross-chain liquidity. While Mainnet is on pace for 2020, security remains the highest priority to ensure this moment is memorable for the right reasons.

Accordingly the team have pushed back on committing to dates in favour of a #noestimates approach to development.

Instead of dates, the community can observe demonstrable progress from the team which will continue to be published in the Weekly Dev Updates over the coming months and as the team progresses through each phase outlined above.

Note: All seed investors and team tokens are locked until Mainnet, so successful delivery of Mainnet is required first.

Rush slowly!

The DeFi explosion has brought with it the red queen effect, as products compete to secure market share on the promise of higher yields, lower risks & better user experiences.

As more attractive & innovative products launch, incumbents are forced into a race to innovate or die; desperately trying to claw back market share in an already saturated market. You’d be forgiven for thinking speed to market is everything — it’s not.

THORChain’s unfair advantage is cross chain always-on incentivized liquidity — the race hasn’t even begun yet. THORChain’s value proposition is unmatched, compelling and extremely disruptive in ways still not understood by the wider industry.

The team’s composition reflects some of the best minds in the crypto space, with cryptographers and blockchain engineers & researchers among them. The team is also supported by large industry players and funds helping to build out the ecosystem and provide liquidity.

While there is always time pressure driving the team, there is also an important realisation that the gap between THORChain and the underdog is lengthening — not shortening. Rush slowly…

Final Words

These past 52 weeks have been filled with long hours and the full gamut of emotions that come with crypto product development. It’s by far the most exhilarating & frightening ride but the team has been lucky to have you, the community along for the ride.

A combination of factors, which include the team launching the project with a humble $3m market-cap and allowing public investors to experience immense upside in a year, radical transparency with no personalities, as well as a deep and familiar brand that generates memes-aplenty, has created one of the most engaged and long-term aligned communities observed of any project to date. The THORChain-Warriors are loyal, engaged and deeply-informed in the network, in addition to being to being proven right in their bet on THORChain — this powers their morale and readiness to engage.

The future of THORChain is bright, with a healthy treasury against the backdrop of strong demand for RUNE and an appreciating network asset; propelled forward by a passionate & motivated team seeking to challenge the very notion of liquidity.

Yesterday’s FTX listing announcement brought with it new highs for RUNE’s marketcap. The network with the greatest purchasing power will absorb the other, and THORChain’s purchasing power is now excess of USD $125 million. THORChain’s impact will be profound.