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THORChain Lounge: Liquify!
Recorded: Feb. 28, 2026 Duration: 0:59:26Space Recording
Full Transcription
It is Saturday. That means we've got our guest today.
I am filler busting because you never know if it takes two seconds or 20 seconds for the live stream to get recording, right?
You know what I mean? So if you guys are hearing this, you know what to do.
Share the space or share the live stream wherever you're at, whether you're on YouTube, X, it does not matter.
It looks like we are currently live on almost everything right now.
I love it. I think it's time to start the show. What do you say, Kenton? Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, you guys, as we know, we always do the
intro first. So for those who do not know, ThorChain is the world's leading Bitcoin decks.
You can swap Bitcoin with 10 different blockchains across 40 different pools without using bridges
or wrap tokens. Check it out at swap.thorchain.org.
One more time, swap.thorchain.org.
Anyone in the world can use Thorchain.
There is no account open.
There's no KYC required.
And Thorchain has two tokens, RUNE and T-C-Y.
The fees for swapping on Thorchain are paid in RUNE,
and that's where the yield come from.
The fees are deducted from the swap,
so you don't need to own RUN trade on thor chain pretty cool 10 as well of the protocols revenue goes to tcy token
holders remember to stake the tcy tokens in order to collect the yield there are no inflationary
block rewards therefore the yield is real money paid by real users rune is also deflationary as
five percent of the revenue is burned. ThorChain is a full
layer one with the ability to create smart contracts on it similar to Ethereum. The app
layer is being developed by Rijira. If you need help with ThorChain in general, join the ThorChain
community Discord and Telegram group. Links for those are on ThorChain.org. ThorChain.org. Guys, please follow ThorChain on Facebook and Instagram.
ThorChain Contact on TikTok. We need at least 1,000 followers to live stream on those platforms.
And by the way, Kenton, I heard a rumor yesterday that actually is no longer the requirement,
but I did not have time to verify it for myself. So maybe we might be good there,
but that's just a rumor. knows and always remember guys this podcast
is for informational and educational purpose only and does not constitute financial advice
or legal advice or any advice whatsoever you guys it is time to start the show i'm super excited
we've got a great team here um but before we get into it guys we always like to do an update so
i'm gonna go ahead and kick it to kenton and then we're gonna get right into business so go for it kenton yeah thanks um uh if yeah if somebody knows that about streaming on
the other platforms we don't need a thousand followers let me know except when i tried
connecting or looking into it that's what it said um but uh i don't know if you guys know this i am
not a pro on tiktok so um um so definitely happy for some help there um yeah please guys follow even just like make a
burner account and follow because like it's just free advertising for us like if you really believe
in door chain you want to get the messages out there um i'm not pretending in the big grand
scheme of things maybe five years down the road fine we're getting tick tock and facebook is working for us but we gotta start somewhere and it's free right just to connect this and stream
there so um so that's great help guys uh yeah a little update here with some marketing stuff
i don't know if you guys saw my blog post yesterday talking about the new proposal logos
i feel like the response has been mixed.
And if the people who are not in favor,
I think half of them have just been kind of trolls
and the other half actually has some constructive feedback.
And yeah, I'm a bit, it's tough guys.
Cause like it's impossible to make everyone happy for one.
Right?
So, you know, it's going to be who do we
upset the least the one thing i say like myself and others are pretty feel pretty strongly about
is that we do need to update them we need to we need to fix them you know if these current ones
that i showed you guys aren't actually aren't aren't it fine but what we currently have isn't working we gotta we gotta
clean it up somehow um so based on the feedback and i think somebody said they're gonna create
some mock-ups to to send to to help for us to look so so this is good this is why i bring it up to the
community we can all work together like you know feedback put it all together right we can come up
with something.
The last thing we need is for this to piss everyone off, right?
This should be fun.
This should be good, right?
We're all moving forward.
We all know what direction we're going in, and we're all on the same page, right?
So one of the things I kind of forgot to mention about is, too,
is when you guys are thinking about these logos,
you got to remember, we have to appeal to millions of people across hundreds of different cultures right so you know and what that forces us to dumb it down right to to kind
of be a bit bland and and ordinary like it because as soon as you start getting more specific
then we might start you know dropping off right some people and um for me that's the one nice
thing with green and blue is it's a pretty universal you know men like blue women like green
like it's pretty pretty hard for anybody not to like those colors um um and then i do like the
lightning bolt because it is simple the other thing is is, you know, when it's, if we put a lot of detail into it, you lose it on a tiny scale, right?
So it's got to be something we can see on a very tiny scale.
So we have to make some trade-offs here and there, right?
So just keep that in mind, guys, with your ideas and what you think we should do.
But yeah, I'm glad people are paying attention i appreciate people's feedback the discourse and the conversations in discord have been great you know people you know um it's
been good so i hope people feel comfortable coming in with criticism and ideas because I want to hear it. We need to hear it.
So with that being said, I'll do a quick intro here of Andy and Liquify.
So you see in my, I got Kenton Node Operator, and I promote myself to authority community as a Node Operator.
Really, guys, I'm a bond provider, and I'm working with Liquify and Andy to operate the nodes.
So when I say I'm a node operator, I'm actually working with Liquify.
You're a very good bond operator.
Thanks.
And that's how this relationship started, is I started using Liquify to manage my nodes.
And then I'm like, let's take this another step further guys and like
let's run some more nodes and i'll get i'll collect you know gather bond providers and
we'll get some spin up some more nodes and um you guys are on board it's been great denny you're one
of our bps i'm one of the nodes um um i like to think everyone's happy. I've not had any complaints and I've had BPs leave other nodes
to come to ours. Ours are pretty well run, there's no drama. I've had BPs tell me they can't get a
hold of their node operator. And I mean between me, you and a few other guys at Lukefie, we're
in the group chats, we're on it. We're always there.
So I started preaching about you, Andy, and Lukefy.
You guys are engaged.
You are ThorChads.
There's a Lukefy channel in Discord.
If you guys ever notice, sometimes in mainnet, Andy will jump in and help other node operators.
So with that, maybe I'll let you take over andy and kind of introduce yourself and
yeah awesome yeah i'll give i'll give a kind of a lowdown on my background and then i'll jump into
what we do at liquify so i'm based in the uk founder of liquify i've been running it now for
about five years prior to that i was a software engineer for eight eight to nine years working
with an automotive company so i was there doing advanced driverless systems and kind of data
pipelining on how data flows through those systems.
So I was there, like I said, for nine years.
I then got furloughed during COVID 2020 time.
I started doing some freelance work, mostly around infrastructure
provisioning for a couple of my friends at some foundations.
That kind of got spotted by a VC, who's a good friend of mine now.
They wrote a small seed check for us.
I left my job, and I've been doing this since for five years.
We're now a team of about 15.
But we do things slightly different at Liquify,
so we're a fully bare metal, self-owned infrastructure company.
What that means is we basically own all our own hardware so we own all
our own servers we own our own network switches we then co-locate that
directly at data centers across the globe which means we're kind of much
more censorship resistant we own and manage all our own infrastructure so we
can do what we want with our infrastructure we're not kind of tied to
these large-scale cloud providers so we're much safer in that aspect we're not kind of tied to these large-scale cloud providers so
we're much safer in that aspect we're not going to have the same thing that
like Hetzner had back in 2023 2024 where they shut down 30% of all Solana
voting power because they didn't want Solana on their network anymore so yeah
like I was saying we're an infrastructure as a service company based
out of the UK we're managing about 250 to 300 servers at the minute.
We're doing around about 2.5 billion RPC calls a day for our infrastructure
and managing about 250 million AUM in staked assets,
be it for people like Kenton being a bond provider
or large-scale VCs staking through our infrastructure.
So how many different blockchains?
We're over 100 now, so I think we're on about 107.
We've got quite a few.
And forgive me, can we just go back?
You said, was it Hedera, did you say?
Who stops putting Solana?
It was Hetzner, so a large kind of bare metal server provider.
People still use them, but it's against their terms of service, so it's still a bit risky.
They decided overnight that they didn't want Solana on their network
because it used so much bandwidth and it was rinsing through all their disks.
So they kind of overnight just shut down, I think it was about 27% of voting power on Solana.
Because they were all running on Hetzner.
It was quite a big thing back, I think it was end of 2023 time.
But you guys run a Solana node, right?
Yes, but we obviously run on our own infrastructure, so we're resilient to all that.
And you're providing RPC endpoints for doorchain nodes that they can't afford to run Solana node, right?
Yeah, so we obviously want Torchain to thrive.
And one of the ways to do that is kind of increasing the number of chains that they're on.
Obviously, with Torchain price lower than it was previously, it's hard for these small indie node operators,
which there are a couple, to run these larger RPC nodes, which Solana is one of them.
So we kind of teamed up with 4chain, the foundation, to help support these smaller node runners by just giving free RPC infrastructure for Solana and Base and a couple other chains who some of these node runners are having issues running them profitably.
Nice, nice. runners are having issues running them profitably. Nice.
Nice.
And I think this is important too, because you guys have some nodes, like for me, on your own, and you're doing the RPC endpoint.
So when the vote came out for Solana about which providers have how much percentage of
Solana, you didn't separate the two, you counted them together.
So the nodes you run in Solana plus your RPC add up to 20%.
So you weren't doing just the RPC by themselves
and then your nodes by themselves
so that you could actually be over 20.
So I thought that was great,
because we're really honest on your guys' part,
helping keep the network safe, right?
You know, not centralizing.
And if everyone's curious, like we, between Liquify and myself, we talked about, you know,
how many nodes we manage, should we manage?
And, you know, we want to keep it under, right now we're under 10% of the network.
So it's not like we've got like all these crazy nodes or anything
so if something ever happens to liquefy or whatever it shouldn't be catastrophic to the network
so another thing andy what i don't remember this but when i was kind of anyone i talked to about
you know working with in thor chain one of the one of the questions I asked them is their views on
censorship and Monero and privacy. And when I was talking to some node operators,
potential node operators I want to work with, I'm like, what is your view on Monero,
adding Monero to ThorChain? Are you going to piss your pants? Are you going to run away?
You know, whatnot. And maybe I'll ask you again, Andy, what are your views on adding Monero to ThorChain as an actual node operator?
Someone who's, you're doxxed, you have an entity. Are you comfortable with it? Are you okay with it?
Yeah, I was speaking to you about this before. So basically, we're obviously a registered company in the UK,
which means we've got to comply with UK legal laws.
Those being if we're told that we can't run the infrastructure, then we won't run the infrastructure.
So we're happy as a company to run it as long as we're not told we can't run it by kind of governing bodies in the UK.
So we're happy to run it internally until we're told that we're not allowed to if that ever does happen and that's great i think that's awesome like i i mean it's too
easy around how people want to you know what people need to do to make themselves feel safe
right it's not up for any of us to judge but that's that's for me that's my how i view it as
well like kind of like don't ask for permission, beg for forgiveness.
And like we're going to get a cease and desist first.
They're going to say, hey, you guys can't do this anymore.
You got to stop. All right, fine.
It's only when you like F you, I'm going to keep doing it anyway.
You know, fuck them, you know, screw the system.
All right, fine. Then you're going to start getting into trouble.
fine, then you're going to start getting into trouble. And yeah, so to my knowledge,
when I've talked to lawyers in the past, that they've never heard of any of actual minors or
node operators ever being given a cease and desist, ever being told to stop doing anything.
So maybe knock on wood, that doesn't happen, right? But I love it.
I love that you're not front-running the law.
Just because the law talks to us doesn't mean we're in trouble
or doing anything bad or wrong.
And it's still an unregulated space.
There's gray areas everywhere.
Yeah.
And until there's clarity, you just keep doing it. Right.
And it's not like the thing is intent. Right. We're not intending to hurt anyone or anything
like that. So it's great. It's really refreshing to hear because it's good. This is a big reason
why I decided to work with you guys. And then and then me being a fund, you know, I did kind of want
to work with someone, docks.
We have an agreement together type thing.
Yeah, makes sense.
You know, for my investors.
You're effectively giving collateral on a network that can get slashed. So you want
to know who you're dealing with in this sense.
Yeah. Yeah. And I've talked about this in the past. By no means, guys, am I saying all
node operators should be docks or anything like that but for my situation for andy's this this works works well for us yeah and um um
and you guys being docs i think does help add a layer of uh uh safety and we can you can be trusted
so so that's great um picture do you have any do you want to jump in i actually have a question
from the audience here.
I'm going to put it on the stream here for you, Andy.
Are you guys personally invested in ThorChain Rune within the company as well?
Correct. Yeah, we are.
I myself personally, I own Rune as a personal investment.
So we've been working with the foundation at Rune since 2023.
We took over a dashboard from them. We improved that.
We also gave
infrastructure grants. We run some public
RPC and public infrastructure for them.
We've never actually sold
that
grant we got. We've held
it. We've staked it in our own nodes.
So we are
personally invested. I very much
believe in Rune. I love the team behind Rune so
there you go guys
well we got a ThorChad
here you guys we have a whole team of ThorChads
I love that yeah I did have a question
my own question is
you know your hardware
is it you don't have to tell me where it is
but is it distributed all over the world
or is it all located in the UK
or you know maybe you can talk about that we run out of seven different You don't have to tell me where it is, but is it distributed all over the world or is it all located in the UK?
Correct, yeah.
Maybe you can talk about that.
We run out of seven different data centers.
So we've got two based in the UK, one in Germany, Japan, Singapore, and US East and US West.
So we're fairly geodiverse.
We span three different continents.
Nice, okay. And would you guys ever consider just depending like who i'm not going
to say specific situations but do you guys have like contingencies if you feel like well you know
maybe we should switch jurisdictions or whatever something like that so maybe you can speak to that
what question because i get that a lot in terms of where our infrastructure is hosted or where
the company's based yeah yeah well that you're um the the parent you're the country of which you're you your entity is yeah legally it's been something we've we've thought about in the past uh for kind
of tax incentives obviously but we've got quite a few benefits being a uk company employing uk
people um we can claim tax credits back on those on those people so so currently it makes sense
for us to stay in the uk um but we are open to exploring other opportunities in the future, but currently we're happy where we are.
Perfect. Okay, awesome. Well, that sounds great to me.
So, okay, guys, so we got it here. We have Liquify here, bunch of ThorChats.
They also help, you know, maintain the network, which is really awesome.
And they're also interested in not becoming a super majority of the network or significant plurality of the network in any way that harms the network. So that's freaking awesome. And they're also interested in not becoming a super majority of the network or a significant plurality of the network in any way that harms the network. So that's
freaking awesome. So maybe, Andy, I'll kick it to you. Maybe you
want to talk more about the services that you provide or plan on providing.
I'll just kick it to you and see where it goes from there.
Like I said, we work a lot with foundations. So we're a very large RPC provider.
We're doing around about 2.5 billion RPC calls per day, like I said, we work a lot with foundations, so we're a very large RPC provider. We're doing around about 2.5 billion RPC calls per day, like I mentioned, across our infrastructure.
So we're expanding that.
Sorry to interrupt you.
Can you put that in a context?
I have no idea.
What is that?
Does that put you in the top 10?
Are you top 100?
It's hard to say.
We're probably up there with the top 10 in terms of throughput that we do.
I think when I was speaking to Infura back in probably a couple of years ago,
they're doing around about 5 to 6 billion a day on Ethereum. So we're not too far away from them.
We obviously catered a lot more to the kind of long tail chains, doing 100 plus.
But we work with Infura's DIN, actually one of their main providers there,
in supporting a couple of the networks on there. How long has Infura been around?
2017, I'm going to say. 2017, 2018. So they've been around basically twice as long as you.
Yeah. So that's great. Good for you guys. Okay. Sorry to interrupt you.
Yeah. So we've got a couple of things in the pipeline as a company. We've got a new indexer coming. We've had a lot of requests for indexing data from prediction markets actually. So we're looking at doing a Polymarket indexer first, which will allow anyone to query data from Polymarket
In a unified API, so that'll be quite exciting when that comes in the next two to three months.
in a unified API. So that'll be quite exciting when that comes in the next two to three months.
Then we've got our own internal indexer where we're indexing any EVM chain and giving an API, a unified API across every chain.
So you can do kind of very granular data analytics on activities on a chain-by-chain basis.
So that'll be quite exciting as well.
And then we're looking to kind of expand to more regions
with our infrastructure.
So we've been thinking about kind of Oceania
or South American regions where we're not currently hosted.
So that's probably something later on,
maybe Q3, Q4, we're going to explore that opportunity.
And then we're also doing a lot more with 4Chain at the minute.
We've got a couple of PRs actually in,
which are going in for 3.17.
And we're kind of taking over more RPC public infrastructure there for them.
So I can kind of touch on those in a bit if you want.
Yeah, so we've got a couple, like I said, in.
So one's going back to the points Kenton made earlier
around external RPC infrastructure around 4Chain.
So for Solana, they had to vote on Mamiya's
to see which node operator we're using
as a provider for Solana.
So I wanted to kind of streamline that process
for any future chains going forward.
So there's actually, I've made a new endpoint
on top of Bifrost, which will show what chain,
what provider each operator is connected to.
So there's no longer need to do those voting on chain.
So it kind of increases transparency around there.
We've also got Ash, who does our research base.
He's just finishing off
batch BTC outbounds and that's going to be quite a big saving on terms of fees. I think
he ran some analysis on that between November 24 to November 25 and it would have saved
the network around about $450,000 just the BTC fees doing batched out pounds.
So I believe that's going in 3.17 as well.
And then I've got a couple of kind of small quality of life improvements for node operators. So it's again kind of going back to this approach of using external providers.
So I'm adding a new load balancer inside of Bifrost to do kind of more advanced failover. So you can select, you can
have multiple kind of providers in your configuration as your node operator and then it will fall back
to the most performant one. So if any of the providers go down, it will automatically route
to a different provider. So it kind of takes the stress away from the node operator having to
manually juggle external endpoints around.
So that'd be quite exciting as well.
And there's a couple of other small quality of life
improvements going.
I have a question about batch.
So the batch transactions, the batch outbounds,
that's like collecting multiple UTXOs, putting them all in one transaction?
Correct. Yes, so currently you've got one outbound goes to one swap, one cross-chain swap.
So it batched, I can't remember the exact number that he was batching together, I think it was
around about four to eight. So it will batch multiple transactions into one single outbound.
So you've then kind of collecting, you're kind of squashing those fees transactions into one single outbound so you've then kind of collecting
you're kind of squashing those fees down into a single transaction from eight plus transactions
is why four to eight is there like a limit i can't remember the actual reasoning behind that i have
to speak to ash afterwards but i'm sure he'll he'll give a lot of information on that i'm i'm
assuming or guessing something i think's something to do with time.
I think it was to do with the memo sizes,
and that you couldn't get past that in the memo sizes.
Okay, gotcha.
So when you said the network would have saved 450 grand,
is that...
So where would that 450 grand go if we saved it?
Is that like extra yield to nodes and pools then?
Yeah, it'd be yield or it would be passed back to the people actually using the, doing swaps across the network.
The actual user would save a little bit extra.
Yeah.
Got it.
Got it.
Well, I missed that pop-up.
What was that?
Oh, that was me. was uh someone just saying man
you guys are actively doing uh thor chain you're developing on thor chain they said that's epic
so that's awesome like it is that i mean this is this is well this is what i always wanted right
like to have a a bunch of different groups all collaborating on thor chain to make it better and
you're incentivized to make it better right I mean if the node operators job is easier your
jobs easier as well but we also can then make the lives of other node operators better because even
though they're technically competition we want them to be stable because without them we're not
decentralized it's very interesting it's a very interesting thing we have here I can't I love
thinking about it so so hats off to you and but since we're talking about node operators,
just, okay, guys, we made a video on the various dashboards.
And the day we were doing the video,
I learned and we featured your guys' – it's like a Thor node dashboard.
Are you okay if I put it up on the screen so people can see?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, I'm going to do that right now.
And this is something really, really cool.
And maybe you can talk about it
here but this so from my understanding this is like specifically geared to node operators right
to make their lives easier so uh maybe andy i'll kick it back to you you can tell us more about it
and i'll just slowly scroll around it kind of stemmed originally like i said from a grant that
we took um from the 4chain guys back in 2023 so they had a very rudimentary dashboard to do
kind of display individual nodes and how they're performing on whether they're lagging behind on
observations and so on so we took that off then we reskinned it gave it a whole new back end
increased its performance kind of significantly and this is kind of our version two of it, so it's a reskin.
We've got, it's a lot more modular as well.
So we've got a few new pages actually coming shortly.
We want it to be a kind of a node operators go to in kind of managing nodes as well.
So there's another kind of improvement to the network,
which I've been speaking to, I spoke to Chad about a few weeks ago, which you need to do.
I can kind of touch on that a bit later.
So we wanted it to kind of be an easy overview for node operators
to quickly glance at and spot if there's any issues on their nodes happening.
You can also do...
Sorry, is thornode.network?
Yes, thornode.network, yeah.
Okay, I'm going to post it for you guys.
It's also, on the back end, it's got an API which indexes all historical data to do with node operators.
So if you press on, for example, where the underline is on all those columns,
so like the rune one, if you press on that, it will give you a...
If you scroll to where the bond is, the bond column.
I'm looking, okay, right here, bond, yeah?
Yeah, if you press on that number, it will give you all the historic data attached to that.
And that's an open source public API as well, which we shared with the community.
Wow, look at that, that's pretty cool.
And you can download it right here. Awesome. So we've indexed basically everything to do with node operators to performance, rewards, slashes, bonds.
So you can get a churn by churn API to query all that data in a very fast way.
So I can share that after the call, the API as well.
It's used by, I think, about 15 different external companies
as well.
Nice.
OK, so if a node operator here is watching this,
or they're going to watch the recording this video,
maybe it's crystallized to pitch them.
Like, what maybe are they missing out
by not using this ThorNode.network thing relative
to maybe another dashboard that they're using?
Yeah, so I want to also, you can do, you can create, generate reports from it,
which hasn't really been done on any other dashboard.
So you can create a report between two different churns.
You can export that report as a CSV or as a PDF.
You can also get reports per bond provider as well.
So you can get kind of a, I guess,
a tax overview on your earnings from that node as well,
which hasn't been done on any other dashboard.
We're also doing, like I kind of touched on before,
so we're looking at ways to do more management tasks
through our dashboard too.
So you can kind of whitelist, whitelist bond providers,
a request to leave, unbond certain bond providers as well.
So that's something we're looking at doing.
It's nearly there, but there's a few kind of security improvements
that we want to do on the network first.
So we currently, each node operator has a node operator address
which manages those nodes.
So in terms of a company like ours, we've got multiple employees.
We have to limit that key to any specific employees which have high level security clearance within our company
because that key is kind of responsible for that node.
So we're looking at ways of doing a delegated key base.
So you can have your main node operator key, which you then can delegate permissions for
certain requests on the network.
So you could delegate a specific key which has access to add bond providers, for example.
So then you could use that key on our dashboard. Or if you're a larger organization,
you can give a new,
you can kind of delegate permissions to employees.
So you don't have this one key manager in the whole node.
Okay, so those permissions are basically the MAMIRs,
is my understanding correct?
Yes, they could be voting on MAMIRs,
or they could be, like I said,
whitelisting bond providers, removing bond providers,
requesting a node to leave a churn, requesting a node to leave a network completely. So you can kind of
limit exposure of that key to do certain tasks, which then we could open up our dashboard to do
bond provider tasks, which would be quite interesting as well.
That is pretty cool.
At the minute, everyone's using custom memos
in various 4Chain wallets that they're using.
So it kind of makes it a lot easier to manage those tasks.
Right.
And the thing that gets me, you guys,
is just by hearing what you're explaining,
the things that are coming, the PRs,
it just seems like 4Chain has really grown in maturity.
And it's just becoming this infrastructure.
It is infrastructure, but it's just becoming so practical,
much easier to use.
We are simplifying everything.
It makes me extremely bullish on ThorChain,
particularly when we have teams like you, Andy,
just helping to make it better.
It's cemented itself now, hasn't it? It's been around a long time,
and now you're getting all these external contributors to the network
and improving it, taking it to that next level, I guess.
Yeah, it's cemented itself, and there's incentives for people like you to improve it, right?
I mean, it just works. It's fantastic. Awesome.
Okay, Kenton, I want going to kick it to you.
Did you have anything you want to add to that?
No, it's been great.
So the Thornode.network site,
you guys are working on updating it.
Yes, so we've got a lot of new pages coming, actually.
Hopefully next week they'll be live.
Oh, nice.
And then we'll have this, hopefully this
kind of
node operator management
once this change I've mentioned
is fully scoped out and live on the network.
Okay, so
if there's node operators out there
and they want to
enjoy your services, what's the best way for them
to contact you?
Email through our website. We've got contact forms on there or just via Twitter.
And the email is on liquify.com, is that right?
Yep, so it's contact at liquify.io.
Contact at liquify.io. Perfect.
Yeah, or .com.
Or .com. Okay, perfect. Awesome.
Yeah, well, this is great, man.
I absolutely love this.
I think what you guys are doing is fantastic.
It's awesome.
And, you know, maybe, like, to, you know, make it a little personalized here,
like, you guys are actively improving Thor Chain.
You have these PRs you talked about.
But, like, if you had a magic wand, right, like, what do you really want to fix
after these PRs?
What would you really like to see that would
improve the network, would you say?
That's a difficult one.
Fundamentals, maybe
more decentralized or
anything you want.
I think they're going
in the right step on adding more chains.
I think the kind of more
scope that we have in terms
of cross-chain, the better.
I think 4-chain should be everywhere, basically.
It does a really good job of doing what it does, so it should be on every chain,
which I believe they've got quite a few coming up, so it'll be exciting to see as well.
And with these kind of new improvements I was talking about to the load balancers,
it makes node operators' lives a lot easier as well in kind of incorporating new chains.
Well, I think you actually make it easy for them.
Like it's a whole different ballgame for new node operators, right?
I mean, like 2021 node operating.
There's a lot of learning.
Yeah, yeah.
So Kenton, you were going to say something.
Go ahead.
Now, say, is there is it fair to assume, Danny, that Liquify, you guys
are able to support any new chain that comes on?
You'll be able to run a full node for that chain?
That's your intention?
So, like, this has been kind of a, I don't want to say, like, hot topic, but a little bit of a debate or concern is that when, with Torchain adds a new new chain, like the nodes have to run that full node.
And so like for an independent node operator guy, you know, doing it at home type thing,
that starts becoming more demanding on physical hardware and needs to support it.
Do you, like, I know Solana is a huge lift, but what about all these other chains that are coming, like TonChain, Sui, Cardano, Zcash, like Tau, BitTensor, some people want?
Do you think the small guys, like the up-and-coming node operators, will be able to handle all those full nodes themselves?
Or is it we're going to have more situations like Solana where we're going to be needing Liquify to provide RPC endpoints for them?
I think that will be the case, particularly on some of those networks that you mentioned. Sui is quite a heavy lift in terms of RAM usage. For a start, I mean, they need, I think,
64 gigabytes plus up to about 128 gigabytes. So it's quite a big node. Cardano is also quite large.
So that's of RAM?
Yes, of RAM. It's quite a heavy RAM. And now we're competing with AI.
Yeah.
Everything's getting more expensive.
Yeah, okay.
So yeah, I guess we could maybe mention that the kind of opt-in chains would also be a very good benefit for 4Chain in terms of scaling additional networks.
That was my next question
awesome yeah so you so you are bullish on that premise you think opt-in chain clients is probably
the way to go yeah yeah as long as it doesn't affect the security of the network yes yeah
and maybe maybe we should just kind of uh help the audience if they don't know what that means
uh do you want to go over it patriot or yeah? Yeah, so right now, guys, the nodes essentially,
okay, the original ethos of ThorChain was
the nodes have to run a daemon of every single real Layer 1.
And on ThorChain, for those who don't know,
it's real Layer 1 to Layer 1, permissionless, non-KYC, right?
We can't steal funds and things like that, right?
It's just permissionless infrastructure.
As we add more chains, especially new nodes that maybe only have one
node, they literally have to host all of these chain daemons themselves. And there's infrastructure
costs to that. And so you're hoping as a node operator, the fees you generate from, you know,
being a node operator basically surpass that of the infrastructure costs. As Kenton and Andy
alluded to, we now have added Solana. And Solana is,
I think, the heaviest chain we've ever added, if I'm not mistaken. It's one of the heaviest chains there is. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And of course, Bifrost, from what I understand,
the Bifrost daemon, that's pretty heavy, too. So there's a lot of heaviness that's going on. So
now, because of Solana, we have switched our ethos a little bit to like, okay, we can do RPC,
Because of Solana, we have switched our ethos a little bit to like,
okay, we can do RPC, right, where it's an endpoint.
But, of course, this argument continues.
Well, we're going to keep adding chains, and as Andy said, suey.
So that's the transition that ThorChain is making,
that we basically remove the idea of doing daemons only.
But with opt-in chain clients,
now nodes can actually pick and choose what assets they
want to support which is going to be really interesting because then the apys i think are
going to vary wildly right like if you have tons of solana volume and there's nodes that don't run
that they're going to miss out on those fees and curse so i think this will actually make the the
um apy competitive landscape very interesting going forward. What do you think about that, Andy?
Can I add something first to his explanation, Andy, before you answer that?
Okay.
Just to reiterate, the reason that each node on ThorChain
has to run full nodes on these other blockchains
is so that they can verify independently what's happening on those blockchains.
If all of the nodes on ThorChain are using an RPC endpoint and they're all pulling the RPC endpoint,
say from Liquify, that's a point of centralization where Liquify could actually screw us. Maybe they
do something nefarious and they affect the data on that RPC endpoint, or maybe they get turned off.
And then all of those nodes that are pointing to it get turned off too.
So the reason the individual ThorChain nodes up until now have been running each their own instance of these blockchains is to make ThorChain secure.
So that if one of these nodes, for some reason, something happens to their version of the Bitcoin blockchain,
we've got 99 other nodes to fall back on.
And using the RPC endpoints, we do relax that security a little bit,
but this is the give and take that hopefully can get us going so that as we grow,
hopefully get us going so that as we grow,
then the nodes that can't afford it
eventually will be able to afford it.
I'll stop there.
Sorry, Andy.
Yeah, jumping back onto the opt-in chains,
I think it's going to have a big impact on the landscape.
You're going to have more indie node operators coming on board
because their costs can be significantly lower than running
15 different node daemons which it's a very good thing you could have kind of
you'll have more self-hosted nodes so people who have accumulated 300k rune who don't who want to kind of explore running a node operator they can can do it much more easily, easier, I guess,
than running everything in-house.
So it'd be quite an interesting change.
Go ahead, Kendrick.
But if a node is using an RPC endpoint,
they're still going to participate in the pool.
They'll still make it?
Yeah.
So I was jumping back to the opt-in chain.
So running the RPC endpoints, like you mentioned,
we've got to be careful in how many people rely
on specific providers, which is going back to that change
I mentioned earlier with the new status endpoint inside Bifrost.
It will give a clear picture on what those node operators are using,
rather than being purely based on a Mamiya.
So that would be quite interesting to see.
I got a question, a little slightly on the technical side.
So, you know, we are at about 100 nodes right now,
and we have an imposed limitation of 120.
The theoretical limitations of, like like TSS, right,
the Cosmos is maybe, you know, 240, maybe 300,
who knows, right?
There's something there.
I'm curious, if we do opt-in chain clients,
let me back up a little bit.
For every node that we add,
if we have a linear increase in node,
we have about a quadratic increase
of the computational burden, right?
If we do opt-in chain clients,
does that alleviate it at all, or is it because
it's that Bifrost daemon?
Is that the linchpin
or the, you know what I mean,
the squeeze point for us?
Don't quote me on it,
but I think it will reduce the
impact. I'm not
100% expert on that,
but you'll have fewer nodes doing observations on each chain,
which I believe would bring down the impact.
But again, I'm not an expert on that,
so take that with a grain of salt.
Well, that'd be good.
Yeah, you know what?
I'll run that question next week for Chad Garford on Thursday.
Yeah, that'd be a good one,
because you talking about that made me think,
I'm like,
well, you know,
there's actually some silver linings.
You'll have less nodes
posting observations
on those chains,
so there should be
less overhead there.
I would think so.
Yeah, I would think so.
Go ahead.
So Andy, what's the incentive then?
You know, we go down
this RPC path
and, you know,
everyone's trying to be honest
about, you know, doing less than 20% RPC calls and you know everyone's trying to be honest about you know doing less than 20%
RPC calls to one entity. What's the incentivized nodes to get off RPCs and start and to maybe one
day run their own full Solana node? You know what you know everything's set up using the RPC
it's easy it works I don't have to spend the money on my own.
I'm upgrading my equipment.
Why would a node operator?
Yeah.
So there'll be a crossover point eventually.
So we're offering free infrastructure for kind of small indie node runners.
There'll be a crossover once if 4 Chain rises in price, if Rune rises in price,
to the point that they're paying an infrastructure
provider to to manage their solana infrastructure let's say they could be spending five six hundred
dollars a month on on those infrastructure fees if there's a large swap volume let's say so there's
there'll be a crossover point where the their earnings from solana outweigh what they're paying
the providers,
if that makes sense.
So they can run that infrastructure in-house and save the fees that they're paying the providers.
So by you running the full Solana node,
you actually are making a bit of money on the Solana side of things?
No, no, we're not.
I'm saying at the minute with Rune price low, there's a higher overhead in paying those providers than the rewards that you're getting from doing the Solana observations.
so they're making more money uh they make they have a higher return on their on their stake that
will eventually outweigh what they're paying the providers to manage their solana infrastructure
if that makes sense so then they can run their own infrastructure in-house and not have to pay
the providers if you take out the fact that we're we're giving the small indie node operators free
rpc so we're not here if we're not if there's no one providing them RPC they're paying
for that on the market so they're going directly to these providers and they're paying them a fee
to do to do the RPC so eventually there'll be a point where the earnings outweigh that fee that
they're paying so that it makes sense then to bring it back in-house now you're doing it for
free now for the small indianator for the ones. Is that just kind of individual deals you've struck?
Or is it like at some point you're going to be like,
hey guys, the free ride's over.
You know, I'm going to give you a year or two or something
or wait until everyone goes up.
But then, you know, we can't, we're not a charity.
So yeah, we're currently doing it as a goodwill
through the foundation.
So the foundation is kind of subsidizing it on their
behalf. Okay, got it. I think that's great. Thank you. And I think that's really helpful to new
node operators because the hardest thing I think is, you know, become a node operator, you just
need experience, right? And you're giving these guys a pathway where they can get their feet wet,
they get that experience, and they can become competent in this endeavor. So I think that's absolutely great.
It also unblocked getting Solana online because we can quickly give people access to Solana
infrastructure. Of course, you haven't got opt-in chains at the minute, so everyone needs to run
that infrastructure and kind of unblock that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Have you given any thought to the opt-in chain thing?
So just for the audience, so this means a node, right now all nodes have to run all the chains that exist on TorChain.
They don't have a choice. But there's, I think this is going to happen.
I don't know if the code is written, but it's coming, I think, eventually.
I think it will need to be there for the privacy chains. Going back to what you mentioned earlier about being censorship.
If you're running out of America, you might,
you might be a bit worried to run that infrastructure, for example.
So yeah, so nodes eventually are going to be able to choose which actual
blockchains they want to support or not and to be able to opt in or out of them.
Where was I going with, I was going to add a question. Oh, so there's, yeah, so with the privacy coins, for example, if somebody's really
uncomfortable, doesn't want to touch it, they're worried about the possible repercussions,
they don't have to. Node operators don't have to. But then they also don't collect any rewards
from that pool um it might also
be beneficial as well for say if there's a chain with low volume that was um had relatively low
low yield and you don't need 120 nodes managing the observations there there could be some
provider saying oh actually the benefit i get from running this chain outweighs what i'm getting in
terms of rewards so them coming off that chain means that the rewards go up for the remaining portion of that.
So there's kind of an economical kind of drive as well on those kind of opt-in chains.
So I think that's great.
We'll probably see some natural, you know, shuffling, right?
Is there, do you have an idea?
Do you have an opinion on like,
what's the minimum number of nodes we would need to see,
you know, managing a chain, right?
Like what if, what if we got, let's just, I'm making this up.
Just say Avalanche, just like, that's just not working.
Every, all these nodes are turning it off.
And we get down to say like seven nodes are managing avalanche,
like less than 10% of the network.
At what point do you think that starts becoming a security risk that, you know,
the less nodes that are controlling it, the greater the probability they could steal?
Do you have an opinion, an idea on where that fine line is?
And do you think we should like almost kind of, I don't know,
can we actually force a certain minimum number of nodes to manage a chain?
I think there should be a hard limit on the number of nodes
in order to operate that chain.
What that is, I'm not too sure on.
I'd say probably about 20, kind of a full vault size.
That's my personal kind of off-the-cuff answer.
Obviously there's the ratio involved in how much funds are in the vault as opposed to how much rune is staked against that, I guess.
So, spitballing I'd say 20.
Obviously I haven't done too much analysis into that,
but I think you'd probably want a full vault.
It's worth of signers there.
Do you think, could we run,
I don't know if some people I think have speculated that,
what if we get nodes that just join
and they only want to do Bitcoin or Bitcoin and Ethereum,
and they don't want to do any other nodes
or do any other networks, blockchains?
And then that just ends up diluting all the yield, you know,
and like, do you think that could be a problem or it's just a free market?
It's going to find its own equilibrium.
I guess maybe you could do it a way so that kind of churn in and churn out
is based on number of chains that you're observing as well.
So say if a node churning in, there's two nodes churning in that say they have the same bond,
but one's observing 15 chains and one's observing five,
you give priority to enter the network on the node that's observing 15 chains, for example.
Maybe that could be done.
That's interesting.
And kind of give it a weighted score based on the number of chains that they're
planning to observe, if that makes sense.
It does.
Maybe same with kicking the node, right?
Because we kick out the lowest bonded node, we'd also kick out the lowest number of chains
being observed.
Yeah.
So you're still preferring that node operators are observing the maximum amount of chains
that they're willing to do.
So you're less likely to get that situation where everyone's observing just one chain, node operators are observing the maximum amount of chains that they're willing to do.
So you're less likely to get that situation where everyone's observing just one chain,
which is the most profitable chain, and no one's observing the others.
Because you're giving priority to the nodes observing a greater number of chains.
Do you think there should be a relationship between the amount of revenue, the chains, I don't know how you would do this that are actually like maybe a node so if you have a node who's like who's supporting a bunch
of cheap chains but there's no volume right but then maybe there's a other node who is supporting
lesser chains but they're really hard to run like solana do you think there's some sort of like
metric there that you could i suppose it would would probably be baked in anyway, right?
So if there is low volume on chain, like I mentioned earlier,
there'll be node operators who don't want to do that chain anymore.
And then dropping out of that chain means the pool of rewards
for the node still observing that chain goes up.
Yeah.
So I guess it's kind of a baked in economical yeah
I think that's right
I think that's right
that's interesting
I like that idea Andy
I think there's something there
I think that's not so bad
you have opt-in chain clients
this changes the game theory right
we could make another
yeah
that's brilliant.
I like these little fly guys.
Andy, are you familiar with Slam Bammers' proposal
about not kicking out the lowest bonded node?
Yeah, I think I saw that.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that.
What do you think?
I think while we're below 120, below the max cap,
I think it makes sense not to kick them out.
I can't think of any downside into keeping them in
because the total bonded rune's high anyway.
So yeah, from my perspective, it's a good proposal
while we're under 120 active nodes.
Yeah, I think so, too.
Chad Bareford did bring a good point, like, that when you change things, it's hard to foresee the consequences of this longer term.
But I think if we, I think if if because what we're worried about what's
the problem right we're worried about a bunch of small bonds get like maybe a
node splitting all their nodes up into smaller bonds and then they get more
voting power right and then maybe this is sort of like an attack vector I don't
think that happens if you gradually do it like if you increase the total number
of no go ahead skanton what do you want to say I'm interrupting sorry I think if
you do it very gradually I think it's okay like if you go from like if we just increase the cap
let's wave a magic wand let's go up to like 300 nodes right we're at 100 and you say uh and
minimum bond goes away i think that becomes a concern right but if you if we go to like dkls
we have mono volt right we now we have one single volt which is just better um for various reasons
um and then you increase the cap of node made by 10 at a time or 20 at a time. And then, you know,
we have a community initiative where we're trying to bring new node operators on. I think that is
safe and that makes sense. And then maybe when you get to the cap, then smaller bonds do get
churned out because then that becomes a metric that matters. But if we're trying to, if we're not at full decentralization,
then it's lax, if that makes
sense. Does that make sense?
Would you agree or maybe add or pivot
a little bit or what do you think? No, I agree
with what you're saying. That makes sense.
As long as you're below that max cap, I don't
see a reason on churning out the lowest.
As long as you don't get rid of the
minimum bond, the 300k,
I don't see an issue.
It's if you get rid of that, then it becomes an issue.
Yeah, that to me, getting rid of the minimum, that's where you risk more about people splitting up nodes for votes.
Yeah, you'll get people clogging up every slot.
And if you have a multi-node operator who's going to split up their bond in multiple nodes to get more votes,
that already exists like
you can already do that and we're if people were wanting to do that we would be at the cap all the
time like um fair but like yeah you'd still have some nodes so you'd still have let's say i've got
five nodes and i split up into ten and fine, I might still have my lowest getting kicked out,
but like, it's not, I still have, you know, eight or nine in the network, right? I still have more
votes than when I started with, despite me having one or two nodes kicked out of the network. So,
and I'm not, I don't see that. What I see actually is all the nodes trying to maximize their bond,
which tells me everyone's actually pretty honest. No one's trying to game the system to get an extra
vote, which I think is great. Can I add a little on that? So I think this is, you know, it's good to have some nodes that are anon.
I like the single nodes that are, you don't know who they are.
They're doing their own thing.
I think that's great.
But I also like this relationship too, because let's say a node tries to does something nefarious, right?
Maybe a node.
Well, we know, like we're really familiar with all node operators.
I mean, they're not who they are, but we know their address, right?
If they try to do something nefarious, like the reputational hit spreads pretty quickly in this
ecosystem and they can be identified as a bad actor, right? And so I think they're not only
showing good grace. I think there is a very well understood, maybe not set all the time,
you know, mechanism. If like, if you know, it is performing poorly, right? Like chronically,
the messed up turns, like they get called out, right? We have yet to see a node as far as I know,
do something outright hostile to the network. If that were to happen, I think the community would
be pretty swift and brutal about recognizing this. And I don't know how we would respond,
but depending on the context of the situation, but I think node operators kind of get it. Like
we don't mess around here and our incentives really only attract good actors like yourself, Andy, like
Liquify. I mean, you guys are good actors and I really appreciate you. And I forgot if I said in
the beginning, I have met some of the Liquify teams in person, guys. They are super awesome
chads. They are super cool guys. I mean, and Kenton, if we don't mind, I'm sure I know Kenton,
you have to go soon i i
i understand um we guys we are going to have btc las vegas we're going to meet up um you know that's
that's the key right we're going to meet people we want people to come please if you're interested
in coming or if you're thinking about just go we want to meet you i want to meet you let's form
that relationship that human connection that only makes door change where i'm going to kick it to
you kenton because i know we're running out of time here.
Yeah, sorry guys, I have to go in a few minutes.
But I forgot to mention at the beginning about doing a meetup in Vegas Bitcoin conference.
So, yeah, we'll try and get something set up, you guys.
But before I go, Andy, I want to ask you just kind of still in this conversation about, you know,
let's say we wanted to break up uh our few nodes into several
when you start each new individual node has its own costs right like it's not like
you can have the cost to run one node how do i say this if you're running 10 nodes is that like 10
times the cost of running one node? It depends on your setup.
I know there are some people who stack multiple nodes on a single server.
It's not something we do.
We split them out for redundancy reasons.
But there are some people who stack multiple 4chain daemons on a single server.
So it depends on your kind of architecture
of how you've set your nodes up.
Because kind of where I'm going with this is
if somebody were to have like 10 nodes at 350,000 rune each,
like aren't their margins pretty thin
on whether they'd actually make money operating at those nodes?
Yeah, and your rewards
are still the same
because you've still got the same amount of stake
to just spread across multiple nodes.
Yeah, it'll be run even thinner
and you've got higher overhead
on infrastructure.
So there is that kind of natural barrier
to entry to try and pull something like that off.
It's going to cost you money.
The only time it would be beneficial
is if you're above the max effective stake.
Then it'd be beneficial for you.
So, I mean...
It's economically irrational, right?
Yeah.
What is a node, an entity or two,
really going to gain by getting some extra votes
that's really going to make them more money versus someone else or something else?
Like, I don't know. It's not saying it can't. Maybe there's always been contentious things in, you know, door chain in the past.
But I guess it is possible somebody could really want a vote to go a certain way and they go spin up some nodes to do it.
I suppose the
biggest attack is if you take over the
whole vault, right? But statistically, that's
very, very difficult to happen
because you've got to have
majority share of that vault.
So yeah,
statistically,
it's a tiny, tiny percentage of that happening
if you had 10 nodes, let's say.
No, 66.67%.
Yes, actually, you need 14 nodes.
And then statistically, you've got to have every single one
all in the same vault, which is, yeah.
Yeah.
Very hard to do.
Exactly.
Guys, I'm sorry.
I got to jet, but figuratively and literally,
I'm going to jump on the airport here.
Do some traveling the next couple of weeks.
So, Andy, thank you.
Safe flight.
Thanks.
Yeah, Denny, thanks, guys.
Obviously, please keep going.
Don't let me end the party.
And, yeah.
Oh, no, the party keeps going, man.
Keep it going.
Yeah, awesome, guys.
All right, well, take care.
Cheers, Ken.
Have a safe flight.
Hey, bye, buddy.
Take care, man.
Bye.
Talk to you later. Bye.
