Swap counts

Swapper count by assets

Swapper count by Chain

Thorswap facilitates swapping of digital assets across chains in a single transaction in a trustless, permission-less manner.

Swaps on THORChain are made possible by liquidity pools. These are pools of assets deposited by Liquidity providers, where each pool consists of 1 connected asset, for example Bitcoin, and THORChain's own asset, RUNE. They're called Continuous Liquidity Pools because RUNE, being in each pool, links all pools together in a single, continuous liquidity network.

When a user swaps 2 connected assets on THORChain, they swap between two pools:

1. Swap to RUNE in the first pool

2. Move that RUNE into the second pool

3. Swap to the desired asset in the second pool with the RUNE from

These pools are created by synchonising, a native vault on the respective chain and RUNE vault on thorchain. These pools follow the constant product AMM formula, hence tend to keep the product constant. So when a swap is made, the incoming Native token cause a flow of RUNE from one vault (BTC vault) to the other vault (ETH vault) . Now as the constant product AMM rebalances the pool, the excess native token (ETH) is release to the user.

(pics courtesy of Finematics and Messari Crypto)

The data for swaps on Thorchain is available on swaps table. As we have seen the every transaction involves RUNE swap, we can easily figure out the direction of flow of assets, and the number of addresses involved in each side of the transaction.

As noted in these Dashboards - User dashboard and Pool volume dashboard, Binance chain assets are the most swapped assets on Thorchain. As Binance chain acts as a good farming chain, we also see that after Binance chain assets, Store of Value like LTC and BTC being important, as Thorswap allows the liquidity stored in these Crypto's to be unlocked and used in DeFi.
We can also see some significant activity post the mid-May crash, as the end of Bull-Run signal could have cause alot of asset movement. This could be swapping Volatile assets into stable-coins anticipating extended Bear-Market or Stablecoins being used to buy the Dip in a stressful market.

While ignoring THOR chain itself, we see that most activity comes from the Binance chain. A simple explanation could be BEPSWAP. BEPSWAP was technically the first public version of Thorchain, and was deployed as an AMM for BEP-2 to or from other asset swap on Binance chain

Next, we can see LTC and BTC. A good explanation for this is that, LTC and BTC are a store of value. In order to put BTC to work and make "BITCOIN BABIES", one has to move this BTC to another chain with DeFi enabled. This could be a cause for LTC and BTC to be actively used in the the Thorchain swaps. A saavy investor would withdraw his funds from BTC and LTC, put them to use on DeFi and then return them back to store of value

Similar to chains, we see the the Binance chain Assets, BNB and BUSD are the most used assets. This is due to the popularity of stable coins amongs big whales and BUSD being preferred as the native stable coin of the Binance ecosystem.

An interesting point to note here would be how LTC and BTC have relatively higher amount of users swapping in rather than out, possibly validating our Farming hypothesis, where store of value is converted into tokens that can be used to farm more value.

One of the striking pattern in all the graph is the organic growth of the protocol. We can see a steady growth in both Swap volume, as well as the distinct users swapping in the protocol. This is very much unlike AMMs where liquidity mining meant, whales rush into at the beginning, drain the protocol dry before exiting. This organic growth and resilience post exploits is a good sign for RUNE holders.