Thorchain is a cross-chain DEX. It achieves this by having vaults across the multiple chains it provides swaps. This means, a cross chain swaps involves the transaction fee's of that native chain. This always gets factored into the swaps and does cause increased slippage loss.

In this dashboard, we will try to analyse the slippage of these type, across chains first and then across assets.

In order to obtain the data we need, we will use the curated thorchain.swaps table. We will first find the double swaps and combine them into a single swap transaction. Then we will collect all the swaps and find the fee paid for the swaps.

Although there are external gas fees, the very execution of swap requires gas fees to be paid, which is reflected in the fee collected for a swap. Hence this would be more than enough to gauge the difference in transaction fees required for different chains.

By chains

Plotting popular chain-chain swap combos against their respective median fees... we get

we can see above, the most slippage occurs when a combinations involves ETH. To demonstrate this better, we will plot the Fees in a matrix of to and from chains.

The top and left edges involve ETH chain and on average have a 0.5% value loss in every swap.

By Assets

Performing the same above using assets swapped ... (click on legend to turn off a certain chain)

Inspite of the clutter above, once again we can see that ETH chain assets in general have higher slippages. This could be

1. Higher network cost (obviously)
2. Variety of assets. All ERC-20 tokens are not built same, hence require different amount of gas for the transfers involved. Alos ERC-20 tokens are smart contracts and hence need higher gas than normal.