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THORChain Spaces #117
Recorded: April 4, 2025 Duration: 0:32:00Space Recording
Short Summary
ThorChain's recent developments highlight a transformative Q1 with record transaction volumes, a strategic shift towards liquidity fees, and a robust roadmap for Q2. The community is witnessing significant growth through increased collaboration, governance changes, and innovative implementations, setting the stage for a promising future.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Thank you. All right.
In the interest of time, I think we'll just get started.
Sorry about the other space.
I have no idea what happened.
That's just what happens with Twitter spaces. So to door chain spaces 117 uh it's a familiar cow so i can just get
started and if chad ends up joining then uh he can also talk with us we're gonna have him on as
a guest today but cool all right looks like everything is good with the mics if anyone
else wants to come up on stage feel free to request and we'll do questions and things. But yeah, we got a bunch of stuff to go over. So we'll take a good amount of time to just go through everything. I'm going too fast. Slow me down. It's going to be a little faster, I think, with just one person up here. But let's do it.
but let's do it.
So we passed the end of the first quarter.
So I'm working on the end of first quarter 2025 report.
And the team is also working on the Q2 roadmap.
So we can just do a quick review of everything that happened in the first quarter.
I'll just go down the list and, you know,
give you some interesting things that have happened over the last,
over the last four, three months.
And yeah, and we'll look at some of the features that have shipped on Thor chain and
Q1, and then we'll also go over what to expect in Q2.
And then we can move on to a bunch of other things that are happening.
Just, you know, the regular update cadence,
what's coming in the next version,
what just ships in the most
recent one um some discussion about economic security and the uh the posture changes we're
going to need in order to ship new things like like ruji and to add new chains uh update on tcy
and the thorfy unwind uh and obviously more stuff about RUJI and TokenSwitch.
And yeah, that's where we're going.
So yeah, starting off with just Q1.
Yeah, I mean, Q1 was actually the highest volume quarter ever.
19.6 billion in total US volume, the highest day being about one and a half billion.
And let's see, there was a lot of swap fees collected, about 15 million in liquidity fees.
And if you recall, one of the major things that was done during the first quarter was a vote to deprecate block rewards.
Block rewards being basically inflationary rewards
going towards LPs and to nodes. So this is the first quarter where we've really pared down on
block rewards and just moving towards 100% liquidity fees. So this first quarter, almost 92% of all fees earned by the protocol were from
organic liquidity fees, which is pretty insane. And Chad's here. Hello.
How's it going, guys? Sorry, got rugged earlier.
Yeah, welcome back to Twitter Rug.
A bit of Rugfest.
Yeah.
2025.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, welcome back, dude.
It's been a really long time since we did one of these together.
Yeah, it's been, what, over a year, I think, a year and a half, maybe?
Probably.
I'm sure the people are, you know, happy to get it back together.
So, here we are.
Get the band back together. So here we are.
Get the band back together.
Reunion tour.
We're back.
Yeah, man, we're back. I'm excited to be back.
I'm rejoining the project.
I'll be taking on some of the more technical lead kind of role within the community.
on some of the more like technical lead kind of role within the community.
Keep my finger on the pulse and making sure we're pushing forward to achieve the different
goals that we want to achieve on the project.
Awesome.
Yeah, great to have you back in the dev seat.
Yeah, definitely needed right now.
And it's cool seeing all the different teams come together as part of dev, like Nine Realms
and all the other teams that have stepped up to just be part of the dev community here.
It's grown a lot since even just a year ago.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely changed a lot since I was last actively involved in the
project.
Now we have several dev teams.
We've always had several dev teams technically, but now we have even more.
We got Strangelove actively building for expanding the chains and Bifrost.
You got Ruji building the app layer and doing all sorts of crazy stuff over there.
I mean, it's pretty exciting to see so many different devs coming together to contribute so much value to the protocol.
Cool. Yeah, we're just going through some Q1 stuff right now. And then we can go into the roadmap
and things that are coming out soon and then just like updates on the most important topics.
So just going through Q1. So first thing was the removal of block rewards. And that was
a pretty major, major change. So 100% of rewards now, that's almost 15 million in Q1. That's coming from just liquidity fees on swaps.
So organic fees coming from anyone making a swap on ThorChain, including ARBs and all the retail wallet flows and everything.
So that's real sustainable revenue just coming towards participants in the ecosystem, LPs and nodes, which is awesome.
And now going forward, 100% of rewards are
completely organic. The reserve is pretty steady just in just how full it is. And it's not emitting
anything, basically. Everything is just coming from swap fees, which is really great to see.
It's something that we've wanted for a long time. And it's awesome to finally see that we're
there with everything just coming from organic fees, non-inflationary
sources. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I'm not sure how I personally feel about this. It might have
been too early, in my opinion, to go down that particular road. There's a mentality that the
blocker rewards were creating a downward
pressure on the room price, which is
technically true, but
insignificant in my mind.
And as the market goes more
bullish,
prices in the industry
go up
in a sense that
we'll have less rewards for people
in those circumstances than we would have. But
that's the decision people made, that's the decision we're going. So here we go.
Yeah. But narratively, though, it's very strong, especially in comparison to like
any other project in this space where, you know, pretty much any project relies on
inflationary rewards just to, you know, keep some kind of flywheel going. It is cool to see us like
kind of weaning off
and just moving in the complete opposite direction
and saying, hey, we have sustainable revenue
and we don't need the inflationary rewards
and let's experiment and get off of it.
Because it's not even necessary at this point
just because of the maturity of the protocol itself.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely a good
positive narrative to have.
The question becomes, what's more important
than the narrative or higher yields?
And you can debate that all day.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah.
Other stuff in Q1, I mean, first thing that was shipped
is the base chain. So, ship base
like, I don't know, first day or two of 2025.
It feels like forever ago.
But, yes, we added base.
We have ETH on base, USDC and CBBTC.
And liquidity has been kind of stunted just because of, like, everything going on in, you know, with Dorf5.
But then also, like, reaching the liquidity hard cap pretty early into the life cycle of
base being added was pretty unfortunate.
So we haven't been able to get super deep liquidity on base, but base is live and has
been cranking out swaps.
I see swaps coming in from a bunch of different wallets on base, which is great to see.
while it's on base, which is great to see.
So yeah, we can, like when we talk later
about the economic security stance,
we can just shed some more light on that.
But yeah, that was the first thing
that shipped this year, base chain,
which I think will be a very impactful chain.
And obviously like what the chain
that's pretty much winning the L2 game right now,
like far and away the most activity going on on base.
So I was pretty happy to see that come out and get live.
Also, the first chain that we've started using RPC providers,
where not every single Thornode is running a base chain daemon,
nor would it really make sense to, being it's much more centralized chain
where every single Thornode is using a...
Well, not every single Thornode,
because I think some are spinning up their own base daemons,
but the first chain where you can tap into a third-party RPC
much more easily to get data,
which is more of the direction going forward,
especially with
the much higher throughput chains which require a lot of resources like Solana
and things so this is the first chain that was shipped with that kind of
architecture yeah I think more more are coming we got a lot more chains are in
the in the works too so I'm sure we see more of that yeah 100% yeah next next
in Q1 the lending and savers, unwind and
restructuring, I think people are mostly familiar with that. But the sunset of lending and savers
and the passing of proposal six from the Maya team. My team is still working on the TCY implementation,
which is scheduled to come out in the next version, which will probably
be in about three weeks.
So TCY is not delivered yet, but obviously during Q1, one of the major events that went
on was just the entire like lending and savers unwind.
So yeah, more details coming out about that soon. And claims are not live yet, so there's nowhere to go to claim TCY yet.
But those details will be coming with the next version of DoorNode.
Yeah, that should be later this month.
We should be able to see this starting to go live.
It's starting the process of it.
Yep.
And the only, the place to claim that will be something like on ThorChain.org or somewhere very obvious.
So, you know, there won't be any rush to claim it.
So just keep an eye out.
And it's something that we'll continually be pushing out updates on.
And a place to look is just here on ThorChain X account.
We also increased the number of new nodes per churn. So previously it was, you could add an additional two nodes per churn. So if three leave,
then five could potentially join. There was a vote to increase that to four, which means if three
leave, then seven could join to increase the total count by four.
During some of the craziness of node operators churning in and churning out, and a lot of them churning out at once, the active validators decided to vote to increase
the number that could churn back in to get back into a more stable position just as a network and get more node bond on active
rather than on standby,
not really doing anything for the network.
So now the network just adds more nodes per turn,
which has helped just increasing the node count
instead of keeping a lot of nodes on standby
when there's a lot of volatility.
Yeah, I think we're at like 100 nodes now, or a little over.
Where are we at now?
I think we're pretty close to that.
Yeah.
If we're not over, it might be at 100 right now.
I thought it was like 101, I thought.
103.
103.
That's pretty awesome, by the way.
Yeah, that is super cool. cool yeah we're over 103 i think we
dipped down to like in the 80s possibly like maybe beginning uh the middle of february maybe
that sounds yeah we we how many home notes do we have at the time of the whole like uh
thor fight drama like a month ago whatever it was a couple it was at 100 then or
how many was we were over 100 we were like close to 120 and then it dipped down to probably like
80 or so maybe at one point maybe in the 90s or like the low 90s high 80s yeah and now now we're
back over 100 up to 103 active validators cool oh clawing Yes, sir. And then the outbound delay changes.
So there were some minor modifications to the outbound delay, which maybe we need to revisit some point in the future, just take another look at it.
But this is something that we did back in the end of January and just making the outbound delay a little bit faster.
So decreasing the amount of time that will delay outbounds for at the longer end.
So I think before it was over an hour, it was like an hour and 20 minutes or something.
It was an insanely long time.
So we opted to shorten that to around 45 minutes, I believe.
And then we just increased the threshold that we'll push through at a single time.
So you get to think of that as like widening the pipe.
So if the pipe is like one diameter,
we just made it a lot wider.
We can push more volume through
without delaying it as much.
So we shortened the pipe and made it a lot wider,
just making it easier for throughput to get through.
So we could not delay transactions as much.
There was a lot of feedback that,
obviously the outbound delay is an important security measure.
Having something there just to stop transactions
from immediately being signed out
is something that was implemented
after the 2021 hacks that happened on ThorChain.
But yeah, the feedback is definitely well received
that sometimes swap times are very long
when there's a lot of volume going through the network.
So it's something we opted to shorten
with a vote that carried out in the end of January.
I think things are a little bit better,
but maybe something to definitely keep an eye on,
just our security posture and how much we want to delay transactions coming out of the network while also keeping a secure experience, but having a good user experience too.
It's a difficult problem that isn't exactly quantitative to solve.
Yeah, that's what always happens.
On the one side of the spectrum, you have security and the one side of the spectrum you have security,
and on the other side of the spectrum you have ease of use or convenience. And you generally
can never have both of them. You have to select one or the other or slide between the two points.
And it's up to the community to decide how much convenience we want and how much security we want.
Right. There's nothing stopping us from just turning it off completely
and just signing outbound funds.
As soon as ThorChain decides that it does a swap
and it could just immediately sign outbound funds,
but then it also removes any kind of protection
that we have around ThorChain sending out too much funds,
which was a potential bug that's happened before.
So it's like, yeah.
The longer the wait time uh the wait time the
more time that we have to react to any kind of adverse situation that we might have to react to
but that also means that that's the worst average ux for a user um so yeah balancing those is tough
i think it's in a better spot though than it was in you know the end of last year for sure
I think it's in a better spot, though, than it was in the end of last year, for sure.
Yeah, we've touched it a bunch of times to make improvements.
Like, swapper clout was a thing we added a while back that helped.
And so we keep on making improvements to try to find ways to best balance those two things.
And that's a tricky thing to hit.
But we've done a pretty good job so far overall.
And most of the time, I don't think there's much of an issue with the delayed outbound,
but sometimes in some circumstances there can be, but it's tough.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
A lot of it's just a communication issue, just making sure that users understand
that they get their funds in this amount of time.
And it really sucks when you delay like a, you know, a smaller
outbound for, you know, 45 minutes or whatever, just because there's some whale swaps that are
going through at that moment. But it is important for the network security.
Yeah. And you can't just say like small swaps are quick and large swaps are slow. Like it's just not
an effective methodology because an attacker will just make, you know, a thousand small swaps are slow. It's just not an effective methodology because an attacker will just make a thousand
small swaps or whatever
and then all the stuff will exit quickly.
That's one of the challenges.
Have you thought about Swapper Cloud at all recently,
Chad? I know you're definitely
the most familiar with the Swapper Cloud
system. I'm wondering if it's worth
just taking a look at
Swapper Cloud to see if it's
actually functioning as we want
it to or whether we should turn some of the knobs to make the system more efficient.
I don't know if anyone really has the expertise to do that.
Have you thought about SwapperCloud at all?
I mean, I remember when we actually did SwapperCloud back in the day, we saw a significant
decrease in wait time., I don't remember
the exact number on the top of my head, I think it was something like 80% or 90%, something
like this.
So it was very effective at the time.
I think part of the reason why we're seeing much more wait times now is because the room
price is low.
So hypothetically, if room price is right now at its all-time high of, let's just say
$20 or whatever, then we wouldn't have any weights at all like as sometimes with the some of
the issues we have are just like temporary issues that we see because of just like market conditions
and this is being one of those things um and also having like not a lot of security you know
uh on the security side is another kind of result of just of just being in a bearish market yeah for sure because all these values are all pegged to
the rune value so as you know if rune price is low that means on average longer swap times
less liquidity on the like you know that's just the the the nature of doorchain and how how
doorchain works because everything is based on Rune
values by necessity.
Right, right, right.
Exactly right.
That's part of the issue, I guess, in some ways.
Hopefully, if Rune were to double in price tomorrow, hypothetically speaking, then we
probably wouldn't be needing to have the conversation.
Right.
I haven't heard anyone talk about the outbound delay
times any time recently, but it's always something
to keep an eye on,
just that we're not delaying things
too much, and whether
adjustments to Swapper Cloud could be the solution to it,
rather than changing the outbound delay system
itself.
Yeah, we can work with somebody like Orion
who does this kind of data science stuff pretty
well, and we can analyze the effectiveness of Swap or Cloud,
like mathematically remove it from the system and see what the actual result would be.
And then if you want it to make it even more effective in the Swap or Cloud,
we could increase your Cloud number to be like 2x.
I don't know. I'm making up a number here, but that's theoretically possible as well.
Or you can just tune down the entire system and just make it less sensitive.
And you can do that, but you also make it like, you know, the amount of money that somebody can steal within 30 minutes goes up, you know, theoretically.
Next thing out here is the removal of admin Mimir. So admin Mimir was completely removed from Thorchain after the Thorfy sunset.
Admin Mimir was completely removed, which means that nodes have...
So admin Mimir had its own checks and balances before where a node Mimir would override an
admin Mimir.
So admin Mimir can act quickly in some situation, but, and it was also barred
from changing certain parameters of the, of the network, but the nodes could always override that.
Now admin Mimir has been completely deprecated. Those keys are completely burned and gone.
And, you know, all that's completely removed from the code, meaning that nodes have complete
control over the network. So a majority of nodes and a vote is needed to change anything on the network, like the
outbound delay, like, you know, anything.
The nodes need to vote.
Admin Mimir doesn't exist anymore.
So it's, I mean, it's something that's been talked about for a long time.
And Admin Mimir was kept around because it was convenient, especially for security, just being able to change things from the dev perspective to be able to turn on new features without having to just kind of being able to react quickly and turn things off.
But with the removal of AdMamir, it's completely in the hands of the nodes. So it's up to the nodes to enforce the security posture of the network and just release new features, do governance, do votes.
It's a new, I don't want to say it's a completely new era for DoorChain because it's kind of like the next step along the path that it was already on.
But, yeah, the governance of the network is
totally in the hands of the validators. And that includes the operational maintenance,
like pausing chains in order to release an update as a guy does a hard fork or something like that.
So that's completely in the hands of the validators and can be coordinated by the community for anything.
So even if like, you know, any,
like there's no admin that can come on
and change any parameter of the network.
It has to be the validators that decide to do something.
Yep, that's another good kind of a green flag.
Yeah, then we have a bunch of things for Rooji and for the app layer.
So we have the, I mean, I'll just go through all these right here.
I'm sorry.
One more thing on the Mimir thing, by the way,
is like I remember when I actually originally coded Mimir,
like, you know, I was actually living in Melbourne, Australia at the time.
And the reason we even called him Mimir was because there's a character named Mimir in Norse mythology.
And at the end of the story, the Mimir character gets his head chopped off.
And so that was the reason why we called him Mimir,
was because we always knew that this was a temporary thing.
And eventually, Mimir would get his head chopped
off, and the protocol would take over things.
So it was always thought to be a temporary thing, even its initial conception that Mimir
wouldn't just be around for some period of time before the operas could take it fully
over and we finally got there after.
A little bit longer than I would have guessed at the time when I
coded it out to begin with but nonetheless here we are we got yeah well
a lot of things changed too we added operational mamiers and we you know we
expanded the functionality of node mamiers that way you don't need a 66%
majority in order to do everything because you know if there's an attack
scenario you need to do something or it say even there's like a chain update, you're not going to get every single node to, you
know, go on and, you know, change some, change some config in order to just do some general
maintenance that is just necessary for the chain.
So like some of the changes that we went that happened along the way, including the operational
Mimir things and just expanding the node Mir functionality, I think went a long way
towards being able to deprecate admin Mimir. And it could have been done before, but I think,
you know, it was like, it was kept around as a convenience, because, you know, like,
basically, like, what if you deprecate it, and then you need it? And then, you know, so it was
more going along the lines of like, all right, if we don't use it within the next, like, you know,
six months or whatever, then we can, then we can deprecate it because we know that
we don't actually need these keys anymore. And then, you know, things obviously accelerated
more quickly off of the base of like, the Thorify unwind, but it was always part of the plan to
get rid of Admonmoner, just kept around for its, you know, incredible convenience, but also like
the fear of not wanting to get rid of something that you might possibly need and could prevent some kind of disaster scenario.
So there's reasons to keep it around, but it is good that now that we're kind of past
admin Mimir and any kind of privileged actions on the network.
I got to hop off just for like two minutes as I get into an elevator, but I'll be back online.
Just give me a minute.
Yeah, sure.
And, yeah, sure.
Alux is here too.
What's up?
Hey, guys.
Sorry for joining just now.
I was always a bit busy.
Yeah, since you told me about the call,
I was frustrated that it was out of time.
But look, we're lucky.
I have a little bit of time now.
Oh, cool.
Thanks.
I didn't think you were going to join.
Yeah, yeah.
If you want to give your updates right now,
you could give updates on TCUI or whatever else is online.
Yeah, for sure.
Thankfully, we had a meeting early.
So I'm here, thankfully.
But yeah, so on our side,
we're pretty much done with everything TCY.
We are just putting a last merge in today
regarding smart contract whitelisting
for the interaction of TCcy with AppLayer
and some little changes on how decimals work
and are handled,
which is, you know,
just, you know, how often you pay out
and to how many decimals,
so it's kind of completely fair.
But once that's done today,
we just need to send the merge.
We'll have it tagged with 3.5.0, and it's how Nine Realms gets signaled that the formal review process should start.
We are really on time because we have almost two weeks before the 3.5.0 cutoff date, which is 17th of April.
Oh, cut off date, which is 17 of April.
And just importantly, it has already been reviewed by Nine Realms,
some parts by Chad, some most, if not everything by multipartite,
by Samna himself.
So it's already been reviewed.
It's just like the last formal review and approval process.
an approval process uh hopefully nothing uh serious comes up uh and in that case we're ready
Hopefully nothing serious comes up.
for 17th of april uh release to stage net and then once you know we will be sure to stage test
extensively uh everything from uh you know the payouts uh the um the ui that the guys from Auto compound cooked up opting out swapping everything if nothing
serious comes up then we should be ready for 22nd of April provided that yeah everything's secure and that we indeed have thorchain release v 3.0 5.0 by then but uh
you know a few things can change uh maybe uh thorchain is one week late with the with the update
which is fine or maybe we notice something that we change and we have to make the 3.6.0 version instead but uh i'm highly optimistic that we are at the end of
the of the um of the race now so uh yeah just uh so you guys know it's a hundred and ten thousand
lines of codes added 20 000 lines of code deleted i'll add the merge request here. So definitely a monstrous job.
We managed to pull off in just these, you know,
what is it, two months.
So definitely proud of our team with that.
Yes, some part is the store migration of the claims.
So that takes, you know, that's probably at least 30,000
lines of code but still
it's been it's been definitely crazy so uh yeah part of what what we've done and the comments from people reviewing have been encouraging uh hans from russia also already reviewed the white
uh listing of smart contracts he saw it was well done.
So hopefully such is the way, again,
of the more formal review process.
I'm adding in the comments now the merge request on JITLAB
for those of you that are not,
you know, can't find it yourselves.
You can there see a little bit about,
you know, what it has, all the commits, all the differences between TCY and develop.
And I encourage people that are technically oriented to also help in their review process.
Anybody can comment on GitLab.
Anybody can provide.
