Standardized Swap Volume

    A few weeks ago we did a question on standardized TVL. Now we’d like to see a similar analysis looking at swap volume in a way that neutralized the impact of price changes. Feel free to look at this any way you’d like, but one idea is to fix asset prices at their current value and apply that price historically to all the tokens that were swapped. Show this metric by week or month (or both!)

    Introduction

    1. In this dashboard, we will fix Thorchain assets to their most recent price (as of May 14th, 2022) and calculate their monthly standardised swap volume.
    2. Standardised swap volume is used to remove the price influence on this metric and focus solely on organic growth of swap volume, as cryptocurrency prices fluctuate significantly.
    3. We will then examine the actual/non-standardised swap volume on Thorchain and compare it to the standardised swap volume obtained.

    Approach

    1. The most recent asset price is obtained by calling max(block_timestamp).
    2. The swapped amount for each asset per month is calculated using thorchain.swaps and multiplied by its most recent price to obtain the standardised swap volume.

    Latest price of each Asset on Thorchain

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    1. The bar chart above shows Standardized Swap Volume by Month (in USD).

    2. As can be seen, after excluding the price influence, standardised swap volume on Thorchain has remained stable and surged in the recent months.

    3. This is a promising indicator for Thorchain because it shows organic growth in swap volume over time, especially in the recent months.

    4. Standardised swap volume will not fluctuate with the market because it is reflected by an increase/decrease in the quantity of tokens swapped.

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    Standardized Swap Volume by month vs Non-Standardized Swap Volume by month

    1. The bar chart above shows Non-Standardized Swap Volume by Month (in USD).
    2. Non-Standardized Swap Volume appears to be higher than Standardized Swap Volume by month for almost all of the months.
    3. This is fitting since the market has been on a downtrend currently, with price of BTC at ~29k USD and price of ETH at ~2K USD.
    4. Terra's recently failed mechanism has also resulted in a price drop from 80 USD two weeks ago to a few cents today. Terra's price on Thorchain is 16 USD at the time of analysis because Terra chain is still not available for trading on Thorchain. Nonetheless, ~16 USD is still lower than Terra's previous prices.

    Conclusion

    1. Thorchain's standardised swap volume has remained stable and increased in recent months. This is a promising indicator for Thorchain because standardised swap volume does not fluctuate with the market because it is reflected in the number of tokens swapped.
    2. For almost all of the months, non-standardized swap volume appears to be higher than standardised swap volume. This is appropriate given that the market is currently in a downtrend.