The price clearly shows the 3 major events that happened in the THOR ecosystem this year:

• March 9th: Launch of Synthetics on ChaosNet
• April 18th: Announcement of Staking 2.0
• May 4th: Launch of the Staking 2.0 Contract

Findings

• Each of the events in the previous timeline also had a massive effect on the overall volume across DEXes (both buys and sells)
  • A few weeks after each event the volume returns to previous levels
• With 1.6M$ worth of THOR bought on May 4th that is the highest buy volume achieved this year
• While the synth launch resulted in a lot of buys of synthetic THOR, the THOR staking launch did barely result in people buy synthetic THOR.
  • You can even see a small spike of people selling their synth THOR on that day
  • Makes a lot of sense as you cannot use synth THOR for staking

In the following section we are going to take a look at how each of those events impacted the THOR swap volume across 2 different DEXes

• SushiSwap
• ThorSwap

Parameters

timeframe

Can be used to adjust the timescale of the graphs below. Shorter timeframes results in more detail but also a lot more values and therefore less readability.

Lets get into it, shall we?

To first get an overview about how impactful Synthetics and THOR Staking 2.0 was for the ecosystem we'll take a look at the price action each of them caused.

Terminology

THOR

THOR is a ERC-20 Token that finds heavy use in the ThorChain ecosystem. Half of the total THOR supply has been put into a "community incentives pool" and is slowly released to the community through staking.

Synthetics

While ThorSwap supports swapping of native assets from other chains (BTC, ETH, BNB...) through ThorChain, this process will require On-Chain transactions for both sending and receiving the swapped funds. As gas fees especially on ETH are high, swapping ETH for a ERC-20 token can easily cost 100$ of fees.

To tackle that ThorChain implemented token representations of assets from other chains on ThorChain which can be swapped for the same price as the "real" asset. Yet by them living on ThorChain using them is a lot cheaper and faster than their real counterparts.

THOR Staking 1.0 & 2.0

THOR holders can lock up their funds in a staking contract ("staking") provided by ThorSwap. This contract will then reward stakers with rewards that come from the "community incentives pool". Staking 2.0 improved the 1.0 contract by adding 75% of the swap fees on ThorSwap to the rewards. Additionally it allows stakers to get other benefits across the ThorChain ecosystem.

With THOR staking being a contract on ETH, staking does require real THOR, not synthetic THOR!