Introduction

THORChain -- An Immutable, Cross-Chain DEX

THORChain takes your default Uniswap further into the Multi-Chain universe!
It allows users to trade digital assets from one chain to another digital asset on another chain in a frictionless, decentralized and trust-minimized way.
On top of the usual single/double LP provision, there's also impermanent loss protection available on THORChain!

In this analysis, we will take a look at users who have been buying $RUNE using their respective assets

Methodology

We will be looking at the past 3 months of data in the following way:

1. Swap Volume over time of the top 6 pools (on both chains)
2. Where is the most significant swap volume from? Let's look at pools and chains

From the average daily trade volume by blockchain:

• more than 50% came from the BNB chain (expected given the large volume from BUSD)

• THORChain has 2nd place which is expected given that the native chain is THOR

• followed by ETH, Terra, BTC respectively

BTC may have a lower daily trade volume due to its high native gas fees as compared to ETH and Terra.

Given that each token can either come from its native L1 chain or from THORChain, here's another perspective on the above data:

• 15% of the BUSD volume came from THOR, whereas the remaining is from BNB
• 33% of the BTC volume came from THOR, whereas the remaining is from BTC
• 60% of the BNB.BTCB volume came from THOR, whereas the remaining is from BNB
• 17.2% of the UST volume came from THOR, whereas the remaining is from LUNA
• 11.2% of the ETH volume came from THOR, whereas the remaining is from ETH

Interesting points:

• Volumes from stablecoins tends to be traded on their native L1 chains
• Suprisingly, most of the ETH were traded from the Ethereum native chain and the proportion traded from THOR is similar to that of stablecoins instead of BTC.
• Even though transaction fees are the same for BNB.BTCB and BNB.BUSD, a large portion of the BNB.BTCB were traded from the THOR chain while it is the opposite for BNB.BUSD.

The average daily trade volume is calculated from the past 90 days of trade volume.

From the first graph of average daily trade volume by pool:

• more than 50% came from BNB.BUSD!
• descending trade volume between BTC > ETH > UST
• followed by BNB and BTC on BNB chain

Looking at both the BTC and ETH trade volumes, there seems to be minimal correlation between BTC's price action and BTC/ETH Swap volumes.

However, it does seems like the trading volume died down prior to the drop on 4th May. After which, there is some inverse correlation between BTC price action and BTC Swap volume.