Purpose

This dashboard presents an analysis into swap fees on Thorchain by answering the following questions:

• What is the full cost of swaps (inclusive of gas, liquidity provider fees) as a percentage of the amount received?
• How does this vary by each pool?
• How does this compare to the cost of swapping through a CEX?

Approach

The following steps were taken to quantify swap fees as a ratio of swap amount for each pool:

• The USD value of fees and the amount received for each swap over all time were determined from the thorchain.swaps table.
• The ratio of fees to amount received is calculated and then averaged for each pool.

CEX fees were obtained from:

• Binance:
• Coinbase pro: https://help.coinbase.com/en/pro/trading-and-funding/trading-rules-and-fees/fees

Average ratio for all pools

Comparison with CEX swap fees

Comparing across common CEX platforms, the swap fees on Thorchain for non ETH pools are extremely competitive:

• Binance - standard fee 0.1%
• Coinbase pro - 0.5% to 0.2% (10k to 1mil)
• Kraken pro - 0.26% to 0.18% (50k to 1mil)

Average swap fees as a percentage of swap volume for each pool are visualised below.

• Fees are higher for ETH based pools, and range from over 2.5% to 0.3% of the USD value of the amount received from the swap
• Fees for BNB pools are the lowest - under 0.04% on average.