What is the THOR blockchain?

• Uniswap, Balancer, Synthetix, Curve or Aave (to name just a few) are positioned today, thanks to the number of supported tokens, available liquidity and daily transactional volume, as the fundamental basis of the decentralized ecosystem. However, all these protocols focus on the Ethereum blockchain, being able to support only ERC-20 tokens and leaving aside multi-blockchain trading, a market completely dominated by CEXs (Centralized Exchanges). Thorchain is a project that tries to tackle this same problem, so it is presented as a cross-chain decentralized marketplace, allowing cryptocurrencies from different blockchains to be exchanged without third-party custody and without favoring any particular blockchain.

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• When one wants to exchange two assets from different blockchains, the Thorchain protocol actually uses what are called continuous liquidity pools, where each pool is made up of a Thorchain-connected blockchain asset and the RUNE token. Moreover, each protocol asset has its own pool with RUNE; and an exchange between BTC and XMR for example, involves the sale of BTC for RUNE in the BTC/RUNE pool and then the sale of RUNE for XMR in the XMR/RUNE pool.

Key Findings

• There are 4 different Thorchain-connected blockchains amongst the top 10 pools by swap size. The most popular one is the BNB chain.

• The pool with the highest swap size both in $RUNE and USD is the RUNE/BUSD pool of the BNB chain.

• The BNB, BUSD and BTCB pools of the BNB chain are the ones with the highest number of swaps amongst the top 10 pools by swap size.

• The pool with the highest average size of tokens swapped in the pool (in USD) is RUNE/UST (the stable coin from Terra) of the TERRA blockchain.

• Considering all the pools, the majority of users fall into the category of swapping between 0 and 3 $RUNE and between 0 and 50 USD.

• Around 63.5% of the swap size (or swap volume) is performed on pools that don not have native tokens.

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• The top 4 pools by swap size are the same (in the same order) in $RUNE and USD. The other 6 pools are the same but follow a different order.

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• The pool with the highest swap size both in $RUNE and USD is the RUNE/BUSD pool in the BNB chain with 1.03B $RUNE and 4.48B USD respectively.

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• There are 4 different Thorchain-connected blockchains amongst the top 10 pools by swap size. The most popular one is the BNB chain.

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• The BNB, BUSD and BTCB pools in the BNB chain are the ones with the highest number of swaps amongst the top 10 pools by swap size.

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• Even though the BNB pool is leading by unique users swapping with 32.337k wallets, the second pool with the highest number of unique users is the ETH pool in the ETH blockchain.

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• The pool with the highest average size of tokens swapped in the pool (in USD) is the UST (the stable coin from Terra) in the TERRA chain. Most of this high value swaps were done before May 2022, as both UST and Terra's LUNA governance token collapsed, so there has not been much action in this pool since then.

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• The biggest amount ever swapped (in USD) in one transaction was 1.33M USD in the ETH pool from the ETH blockchain. That was because a whale (= a user with a large amount of funds) entered the NFT ecosystem and Ethereum is the blockchain par excellence for this. BTC has the second largest swap (1.02M USD). It is common that big crypto investors are involved in the first cryptocurrency, as it is supposed to have less volatility than the altcoins.

• The swap volume of all the pools combined is 2.691B $RUNE and 11.89B USD.

• Considering all the pools, the majority of users fall into the category of swapping between 0 and 3 $RUNE and between 0 and 50 USD. This is expected as the average user is considered to have low funds and often interacts with pools from different blockchains to get the minimum amount of native tokens to pay the blockchain’s fees.

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• However, the group type with the highest number of swaps stands between 200 and 1.000 $RUNE and between 1.000 and 10.000 USD, with 1.65M and 1.7M swaps, respectively.

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• As mentioned before, the Thorchain protocol uses what are called continuous liquidity pools, where each pool is made up of a Thorchain-connected blockchain asset and the RUNE token. The charts on the sides show the swap size in $RUNE and USD classified by when the pools contain a token that is native in the connected blockhain pool vs the asset’s pegged version (not native).

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• Both $RUNE and USD charts show that around 63.5% of the swap size (or swap volume) is performed on pools that don’t have native tokens. This is no surprise as each blockchain only has one native token, so the comparison is between the volume of one pool to the volume of many pools for each blockchain.

Conclusions

• There are 4 different Thorchain-connected blockchains amongst the top 10 pools by swap size. The most popular one is the BNB chain.
• The pool with the highest swap size both in $RUNE and USD is the RUNE/BUSD pool of the BNB chain.
• The BNB, BUSD and BTCB pools of the BNB chain are the ones with the highest number of swaps amongst the top 10 pools by swap size.
• The pool with the highest average size of tokens swapped in the pool (in USD) is RUNE/UST (the stable coin from Terra) of the TERRA blockchain.
• Considering all the pools, the majority of users fall into the category of swapping between 0 and 3 $RUNE and between 0 and 50 USD.
• Around 63.5% of the swap size (or swap volume) is performed on pools that don not have native tokens.

Methodology

The data used in this analysis was collected from the swaps table of the flipside_prod_db schema in the thorchain database. This table provided information about all the pools where Thorchain-connected blockchain assets where swapped with $RUNE. More precisely, this information was obtained from the pool_name field. However, we had to split the text contained in it to obtain the chain and the asset separately by using the split_part function.

For example, the BNB.BNB pool_name is divided in two parts where the name in front of the dot indicates the blockchain and the name after the dot specifies the asset in the pool.