The THORchain network is one of a kind in the crypto ecosystem where they have been able to solve the problem of cross-chain native swaps which has plagued the ecosystem for quite some time now. We shall not go much into the working of THORchain, but we shall look at the first week's volume and liquidity of their pools.
A pool's first-week volume is akin to a music album's first week of sales as we can have an idea of the pool's popularity. The liquidity is also a good indicator of how investors (liquidity providers) think about the potential success of the pool, which we can shortly call investor confidence.
First, let us look at the first week's volume of THORchain pools as depicted in the bar chart below. We can see that TERRA.UST
and TERRA.LUNA
had the most first-week volume with 57.1M and 26.1M USD respectively. In third place is the ETH.THOR
pool with 21.4M USD worth of volume recorded in the first week.
We can credit LUNA and UST's volume due to their high anticipation. Prior to LUNA and UST pools launch on THORchain, LUNA was in the top 10 crypto tokens by market capitalization so it was a very huge boost.
Next, let us take a look at the first-week liquidity. Liquidity in this sense refers to the number of assets denominated in USD that were added to THORchain pools. Again, we can witness a similar pattern with ETH.THOR
having 122.4M USD in liquidity, followed by 40.3M for TERRA.LUNA
and 31.8M USD for TERRA.UST
.
Looking at the data above, we can say that market capitalization and perceived utility was the major driving force in the first-week volumes, especially for Terra, with the case of Anchor. Liquidity on the other hand was driven by investor confidence based on the expected return on investment (POI).