THORChain Q1 ‘23 Ecosystem Report

1 January 2023 — 31 March 2023

Nine Realms

Published in

THORChain

7 min readApr 6, 2023

Summary

THORChain continues to build through the bear market. Several interfaces have been added and trading volume has seen steady growth over the last 3 months. Website updates have occurred and several protocol changes have happened. Savers has seen large growth and ILP has been sunset as the protocol evolves. Testing has begun on Lending in Stagenet and a new regression test framework is being rolled out.

A Look at Q1 Network Statistics

Link to dashboard — More stats — Even more stats

Total Volume (USD): $1.22b
Highest 24h Volume (USD): $37.14m

Change in Liquidity: $93.91m to $122.23m (+30%)
Change in Savers Positions: $9.07m to $25.73m (+183%)
Liquidity Fees Collected (USD): $1.92m
LP Earnings Breakdown: 28.44% Liquidity Fees — 71.56% Block Rewards

Top 5 Swap Routes (by USD Volume)
BTC <> RUNE — $194,807,352
ETH <> RUNE — $188,976,077
BUSD <> RUNE — $134,818,773
BTC <> ETH — $104,265,977
BUSD <> BTC — $49,946,746

Top 5 Interfaces (by USD Volume, Swap Count, & Liquidity Fees Produced)
Trust Wallet — $40,075,296 in 33,299 swaps, producing $505k in fees
THORSwap — $54,639,373 in 13,841 swaps, producing $280k in fees
ShapeShift — $5,826,585 in 1,403 swaps, producing $67k in fees
THORWallet — $5,626,285 in 3,352 swaps, producing $50k in fees
XDEFI — $2,814,168 in 828 swaps, producing $33k in fees

Total Fees Collected by Affiliates: $188.86k

What’s New to THORChain in Q1 2023?

Lending on Stagenet

The lending code has been written, merged and deployed to Stagenet for testing. The devs successfully opened the first decentralized, overcollaterialized $BTC loan utilizing real, native $BTC. Code rework, additional reviews and regression testing are currently underway.

Anyone can participate in testing and hardening the lending design:

Technical: opening/closing loans on stagenet, writing regression tests that test loan flow in differing economic conditions (via modified mocknet genesis state).
Non-technical: review the Lending On-Ramp document, an explainer document for traders, economists, protocol designers and security researchers.

Discussion for lending testing should take place in the #economic-design channel in the developer discord.

Lending resources (note that older resources may be outdated):

New Regression Test Framework

Regression tests allow for black-box testing of thornode via real transactions and API endpoint queries, along with a checkpointed state export at the end of each suite. This allows for easier reasoning around tests and captures more side effects than unit tests — giving high confidence that changes do not break existing functionality. This is in use for regular network updates and will be used to test the Lending code.

Details on usage can be found in the README and the MRs are here and here.

Dynamic Outbound Fee Improvements

Fee improvements have been made to THORChain. Previously, THORChain charged users 3x the on-chain gas price of external chains. As of THORNode v108, the logic has been changed to dynamically adjust the multiplier used to estimate gas fees for outbound transactions. This should result in an overall decrease in fees, especially for swaps being settled in Ethereum and ERC-20 assets.

See the MR here for more details. An ADR may need to be passed for this to finally take effect.

Integration Updates

Developer guides have been created on the dev docs site along with a video guide to facilitate more integrations with interfaces and wallet providers.

Trust Wallet iOS Integration

Trust Wallet launched their THORChain integration on iOS, supporting cross-chain swaps between BTC, ETH, and BNB Beacon Chain. Since the iOS integration went live on February 7th, Trust Wallet has become the largest THORChain interface in terms of both USD volume and daily users performing swaps.

ShapeShift Savers Integration

ShapeShift integrated THORChain Savers vaults to their frontend interface. The ShapeShift team is highly aligned with THORChain and the teams will continue to work closely together to deliver best-in-class products to ShapeShift’s user base. Listen to a recent podcast for more details.

Sunset of Impermanent Loss Protection

Impermanent Loss Protection was grandfathered for deposits made after block 9450000. ILP remains in effect for any Liquidity Position taken out before that time. ILP was an important feature in bootstrapping the network. However as the network has evolved, it is no longer required. Savers Vaults offer a yield product without impermanent loss and is a much less cognitive burden for end users. Full details in ADR 005.

Protocol Owned Liquidity Enabled

Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL) has passed the vote to be enabled (ADR-006). The team will turn on POL as soon as the network is in the position to begin adding liquidity which will likely happen early Q2.

THORChain Website Update

The primary domain, https://thorchain.org, has been transitioned to the new website layout, maintained by Nine Realms. Content has been overhauled for a simple interface that addresses the main audiences of the website: Potential integration partners, swappers, yield seekers, and RUNE holders. Any community member can contribute to the website development and content.

Contribute here: https://gitlab.com/ninerealms/thorchain-website

AsgardEx Maintenance Status Update

Long time core contributor for AsgardEx has advised he is no longer able to be a contributor to https://github.com/thorchain/asgardex-electron/. Maintenance will be performed by Nine Realms fixing anything that is critical or broken, particularly around node ops. For any new features or chains, bounties will be posted for community contributors as the need arises. If a reliable developer submits enough bounties they will be considered for a part time or full time payments. Interested parties can inquire in the #asgardex-desktop channel in developer discord.

Ongoing

Killswitch Completion

The ERC-20 and BEP-2 RUNE “killswitch” is almost complete. Both forms of RUNE will be completely deprecated on block 11756000 estimated for late June or early July 2023.

Planned Obsolescence Update

What is planned obsolescence?

Gitlab/Github admin — handed over to Nine Realms ✅
Twitter account control — handed over to Nine Realms & community ✅
Vesting — Will end in July along with completion of the Killswitch ⏲️
Mimir Admin Keys — Changes made to enforce tighter controls. Sole access to admin keys will rest with THORSec, all other keys/access will be removed ⏳
Treasury Control — Transfer in progress ⏳

All steps should be completed by the end of July 2023.

THORChain Security and Ongoing Operations

Security is always at the top of mind for THORChain. As mentioned previously, “It is understood that security measures can have an interim negative effect on the user experience. Nodes may pause trading on the network, and trading on individual chains can be paused for many reasons. However, this design is necessary to maintain security and resilience of the network and protect user funds.”

Trading pauses will continue to be a normal part of THORChain’s ongoing operations in order to protect the network and user funds. Node Operators or THORSec can pause trading at any time if they feel there is a risk to the network or one of its dependencies (eg. TSS code) which handles vault security.

When applicable, a Post Mortem report is created and shared, as sensitive information relating to security cannot be shared publicly during an ongoing incident or investigation.

In The Pipeline

Swaps & Savers Integrations

The Nine Realms team is working expeditiously to create new partnerships with wallets, DEXs, and aggregators to integrate THORChain’s cross-chain swaps, savers, and lending functionality. Usually, these integrations are not announced long before they are live in production. Groups interested in utilizing THORChain’s cross-chain infrastructure should get in touch with the Nine Realms team to get started or visit https://dev.thorchain.org

BNB Chain Integration

BNB Smart Chain is the next chain that will be integrated directly with THORChain. Nine Realms is currently working on the chain client and bifrost connection as well as exploring partnership/integration opportunities in the BNB Smart Chain ecosystem.

THORChain 2023 Look Ahead

A brief review of 2022 and a look ahead at new features in 2023.

medium.com

Ecosystem Projects Update Summary

THORSwap

SwapKit release: one-stop API/SDK suite of cross-chain services to allow easy THORChain integration
New Cross-Chain Transaction Tracker
1Inch integrated as AVAX liquidity provider via DEX aggregation
Mises browser integration
Steady Real Yield APY of 3% in Q1 for $vTHOR from affiliate fees.
THORSwap Web App back infrastructure updated to SwapKit, resulting in: Code reduction by ~40%, Reduced initial page load by ~50%, Separate chains and wallets for integrations, More than 1k test releases to npm

THORWallet

Total wallet interface redesign
New home, wallet, swap, asset, earn, missions, LP and savers screens.
Added functionality for Savers analytics
Thorchain key metrics displayed on home screen
Support for MAYA protocol
New referral program
Canto chain integration
Implementation of quote API
Reached 40k downloads
Crossed 160M in total volume
Selected Top 50 Crypto Valley Startup
Improved backend infrastructure to support continuous growth
Multi-language base set up completed

XDEFI Wallet

Total wallet interface redesign
Bitcoin Ordinals support
Cosmos, Osmosis, and Axelar chain integrations

Defispot

Integrated Fuse, Aurora, Juno, and other EVM chains
Aggregation with 1Inch, Wormhole, LayerZero

Media

Weekly THORChain Podcasts:
Watch on Nine Realms YouTube (Full transcripts in description with timestamps)
Past Episodes available on RUNEBASE
Grassroots Crypto Videos:
How to get Information from THORChain
Develop on THORChain Full Guide
LPUniversity:
Regular condensed “state of THORChain” update articles and periodic deeper-dives “Under the Hood” explainer articles

THORChain Community

To keep up to date with THORChain, please monitor community channels, particularly Telegram, Discord, and Twitter: