With the invention of smart contracts (aka programmable money), also came programmable robots popularly known as bots. This meant that a computer program could be coded to perform functions on a decentralised platform (DeFi) as if it were human, with more accuracy and precision.

THORchain, is also a smart contract platform and is susceptible to bots running on the network. This publication aims to understand the extent of bot activity within the THORchain network and try to form reasonable opinions with data.

First and foremost, we will have to define objectively, what a bot is in order to proceed. In the context of this investigation, a bot shall be defined as any wallet on the THORchain network that has been able to execute more than 2 transactions in a single minute. This makes sense because it takes longer than a minute to execute a transaction manually on THORchain.

With this definition, how many bots are there on THORchain? Find the answer below.

Our query tells us that there are 3,753 addresses that fit our defined criteria.

Having filtered out the bot addresses, we can dive into how frequently they operate. Let's take a lot at the number of transactions (swaps) performed by regular users as against those performed by bots in the chart below. You can see that bot transactions make up over 90% of the total swap court of the THORchain network. Regular users account for only 8.15%.

Let's take a look at the next chart below showing transaction volume by bots as against regular users. We can see a distribution similar to the latter with bots accounting for 84.4% of the network volume.

What Are The Bots Doing With All This Volume?

To get a sense of what the bots are up to, we pulled up a table of the most popular swap pairs by transaction count as you can see below. The top 2 pairs are RUNE-BUSD, and BUSD-RUNE which represent different sides of the same pool.

Typically, transactions, where you move between a stablecoin to a volatile token and back to a stablecoin, are suggestive of arbitrage trades. This is not surprising because arbitrage keeps token prices in DEXs in check.

Now let's break down the bots by volume to get a sense of how the bots are distributed. We want to know how many bots are involved in the majority of bot volume. With over 3k bots, and looking at the donut chart below, we can count the number of bots that make a majority of transactions. To speculate, we can say that 20% of bots are responsible for 80% of the volume generated by bots. This distribution adheres to Pareto's principle.

The information that we have been able to gather above suggests there is more bot presence on THORchain than real human presence. This is not a bad thing as it seems that most bots are involved in arbitrage. Due to the wide array of tokens supported and will be supported on the THORchain network in the future, arbitrage opportunities will abound and therefore bot activity is expected to also increase proportionally.