One of the biggest $ZEC swaps on THORChain so far: 0.365 $BTC for 24.7 $ZEC, about $29.6K.
The $ZEC pool held 22.9 $ZEC when the swap started. The swapper received more than the pool held.

THORChain streamed it: 1,300 sub-swaps over 1h58, with arbitrageurs refilling the pool between them. The pool never dropped below 22.2 $ZEC. THORChain's fee came to about 0.22%, and the app the swapper used added 1.25%.

About 15% of the deposit came back. The swapper had set a price limit, and midway through $ZEC got 5% more expensive in the pool. Streaming checks that limit on every sub-swap. 197 of them would have delivered less $ZEC than the limit allowed, so THORChain skipped them and refunded 0.065 $BTC instead of filling at a worse price. Once the price came back, the rest of the swap went through.

$ZEC is still in a progressive rollout. The pool is kept small while the integration is tested on mainnet, and liquidity deepens once that goes well. With streaming, a thin pool means a longer wait, not a worse price.

thorchain.net/tx/9AD0223E5CE59BE9F3550516C1B31C33FC8FA3A09F90790548C9C530AD9EC813

More checks on every code change, and faster answers.

THORNode's CI now gets a merge request to green in 24 minutes instead of 97. The report covers what changed over the month, and the new tests built to break the code on purpose before it can be merged.

Here's what happened across the THORChain ecosystem last week.

THORChain v3.21 is live. Bond providers get streaming yield at every churn once nodes switch it on, Solana fee sampling is back to reopen SOL trading, and Monero gets more groundwork ahead of v3.21.1.

With the upgrade in place, Rujira, the app layer of THORChain, is back online. Its trading, lending and staking products are running again, and around 192,000 RUNE in accumulated rewards went out to bRUNE stakers in a single distribution, alongside 21,000 RUNE in protocol revenue for RUJI stakers.

Across the wider ecosystem, ASGARDEX released v1.47.0 with bond management tools for RUNEBond, market and limit trading on the pool chart, and Zcash swaps on THORChain. Maya Protocol rolled out v135, closing the final step of its Network Recovery Proposal with trading back to normal. SwapKit published its Q3 report, its biggest quarter yet with $1.82B in volume, up 36.5% from Q2.

Our Q3 2026 report is live on the blog ⚡️

THORChain v3.21 puts Monero at center stage.

This release strengthens nearly every part of the XMR integration, from FROST key generation to reorg recovery and signing readiness. It also readies Solana, Zcash, Limit Swaps and Memoless Swaps to resume, and gives bond providers Streaming Yield.

Burning takes RUNE out of circulation and stops there. Protocol-Owned Liquidity takes it out of circulation too, and keeps it working.

Every block, 20% of THORChain's system income goes into the pool that earned the most fees for its depth over the last 3 days. Arbs pair the RUNE with the token on the other side, so the protocol ends up holding RUNE and $ZEC, $TRX or whatever else swappers want most.

That position does three things a burned token can't. It earns swap fees. It deepens the pool, so swaps get better prices. And it buys the dip: when $RUNE drops against the paired token, the position trades part of that token for more RUNE, automatically.

v3.21 is finally cut. It ships a ton of network fixes and should bring THORChain back to full functionality, plus a long-requested feature.

Upgrade halt height: 28,366,100 (approx. Fri Oct 23, 13:40 to 16:15 UTC). The block height is what counts, the time is an estimate.

Monero

Bad news first: XMR doesn't ship with 3.21.

3.21 does ship many XMR hardening fixes though. The remaining fixes come with 3.21.1, which shouldn't be far behind. No firm date yet.

New feature: Streaming Yield

Bond Providers will be able to direct a portion of their bond yield straight to their wallet, instead of waiting for their Node Operator to churn out to realize profits.

It ships disabled by default and goes live once enabled by Mimir.

The fixes

SwapKit affiliate fees. 3.21 fixes a glitch in how affiliate fees were paid out. This lets SwapKit turn THORChain back on with several integrators, which should bring a nice bump in volume.

SOL. Trading was halted after a new transaction type appeared on Solana. 3.21 ships the fix that lets SOL trading be turned back on.

ZEC. An outbound matching issue caused a vault slash. No funds were lost. 3.21 ships the fix that lets trading be turned back on.

App Layer. Several fixes patch the recent FIN contract exploit on Rujira, so the App Layer can be unhalted.

Limit Swaps. Some bugs were causing state bloat, so Limit Swaps were paused. 3.21 ships fixes so they can be turned back on.

Memoless Swaps. Memoless was getting spammed, so 3.21 introduces dynamic pricing: registration gets more expensive as memo slots fill up. Once it's enabled by Mimir, memoless swaps can come back.

TL;DR

• Upgrade at block 28,366,100, around Fri Oct 23
• No XMR yet, remaining fixes in 3.21.1
• Streaming Yield ships, live once enabled by Mimir
• Fixes for SwapKit fees, SOL, ZEC, App Layer, Limit Swaps and Memoless

Full release notes: https://gitlab.com/thorchain/thornode/-/releases/v3.21.0

THORChain shares 20% of the fees on SwapKit swaps, and SwapKit turns it into cheaper quotes.

In its first 12 days, SwapKit routed $18.58M through THORChain, up 24% on the 12 days before. More routed volume means more fees shared, which funds more discounted quotes.

Early numbers. The coming weeks will tell more.

Every change to THORChain follows the same path.

It starts with an ADR. Anyone can write one and bring it to the THORChain Discord: a new chain, a fee change, a new feature. Protocol-owned liquidity began as a proposal from a community member.

The proposal gets debated in the open. Developers, node operators and users ask questions, push back and rework the details.

Then the nodes vote. A change passes when 2/3 of active nodes approve it. Today that's 74 of 111 nodes, run by ~56 independent operators. Each node gets one vote.

Bitcoin started on that idea: open to anyone, decided by the network. THORChain keeps building on it.

To bring more transparency and clearer communication, THORChain's devs launched a public dashboard. ⚡

devops.thorchain.org tracks every public task, with the next release pinned on top. Merge requests show their approvals and CI status, pulled live from GitLab. Every stagenet release candidate gets its test results posted, failures included, and the page shows what's blocked and why.

You'll also find the daemon updates node operators have to run, the Router V6 rollout chain by chain, the XMR launch checklist, and how many nodes have moved to each new version. If you follow the dev side, bookmark it.

Three wallets now run dynamic fees on THORChain: ShapeShift, symbiosis_fi and EdgeWallet. Each gets its own fee floor, pair by pair. Every epoch it moves 1 bps up or down and keeps the direction that earned more.

ShapeShift has run it the longest. Until early July it paid a flat 10 bps. Since then the fee moves with the flow, mostly between 2 and 8 bps, as each route finds its price.

Here's what happened last week ⤵️

Headline News
REVSHARE is live with SwapKit. SwapKit gets 20% of the fees THORChain earns on the swaps it routes, and uses it to lower fees and improve quotes.
Rujira's app layer stays paused until v3.21, now in stagenet testing.

Launches
RAVN is live in beta, with THORChain delivering native $BTC from day one.
THORWallet shipped limit orders.
Vultisig added THORChain node reward history.
codehans1 introduced Rujira Connect, an offline, private signing extension for hardware wallets.
Rujira previewed a new wallet modal, with Trust Wallet and WalletConnect coming soon.
ASGARDEX released v1.46.1: it fixes max $ADA swaps, adds zero base fee BNB Chain sends, and keeps 0.02 $RUNE for fees on max $RUNE deposits.

Community
RUNEBond counted 111 active nodes after the latest churn, thanks to a wave of new single-node operators.
$RUNE now makes up close to 10% of Unstoppable Wallet's treasury.
Raynalytics built a REVSHARE dashboard tracking the economics on both the THORChain and SwapKit sides.
GrassRoots is updating its THORChain docs to explain Mimir, the network's settings, and halt controls.
Redacted released a wallet exposure checker that works with THORChain addresses.

Have you swapped on THORChain’s frontend yet? 

https://swap.thorchain.org/?ref=b8muzyjrfpkc

Did you know over a third of all THORChain volume comes from Bitcoin?

$43.7B out of $125.6B, all of it native $BTC.

THORChain speaks Bitcoin's language. You keep your keys and nobody has to approve your swap. Five years in, Bitcoin is still the chain that moves the most volume on THORChain.

REVSHARE is live. SwapKit now gets 20% of the fees THORChain earns on the swaps it routes.

Until now, the only way for an integrator to earn more was to charge users more. With REVSHARE, the protocol pays them from its own income instead, and SwapKit uses it to lower its fees and offer better quotes.

The bet: cheaper swaps bring in more volume than the share costs.

Raynalytics built a dashboard to track it: raynalytics.net/dashboards/rev-share

How REVSHARE works: blog.thorchain.org/adr-029-affiliate-revenue-share

$RUNE is 100% unlocked.

The supply has only moved one way. 1B at launch, then 500M, then 360M after ADR-023 burned 64.4M RUNE from the Reserve in May.

RUNE also earns. Nodes bond it to secure THORChain and receive 59% of system income. That income comes from swap fees paid by people using the protocol cross-chain swapping cryptos.

Another 20% now goes to Protocol-Owned Liquidity. Every 3 days, the protocol deposits RUNE into the pool that earned the most fees relative to its depth. Half of it stays as $RUNE, owned by THORChain.

Every swap now pulls a bit more RUNE off the market.

THORChain is the most censorship resistant cross-chain DEX in the world, and it's self sustaining.

Over the last six months it generated $6.4M in network revenue, all of it paid by people using it.

Integrators have earned $49.1M in affiliate fees routing swaps through THORChain.

Set your rate in the memo, ship it, get paid. No approval to ask for, and nobody who can cut off your users.

Uncensorable swaps are a product people pay for. You can be the one selling them.

Here's what happened last week ⤵️

Headline News

$ZEC is now on THORChain. The network churned, every node now watches the Zcash chain, and the Treasury added ~$51K of liquidity to the pool. It's a soft launch while depth builds, so keep swaps small for now.

Maya Protocol is back. MAYAChain v1.133.0 is live after the recovery migration, swaps and liquidity are open again, and the attacker's 8.87M $CACAO was burned.

Launches

Moca added $ZEC swaps and routed one through the new pool the same day.

THORDEX launched THORDEX Zcash: swap $BTC into $ZEC with 0% THORDEX fees, then shield it in your Zcash wallet.

THORXMR now supports $ZEC trading, with $XMR next in line.

DeFi for $ZEC is coming to Rujira, with plans to support it across trading, CCL, DCL, lending and borrowing.

BooneW added Ledger support to tcli, the agent-facing THORChain MCP/CLI.

Community

Raynalytics built a dedicated Zcash dashboard to track the $ZEC pool from day one.

Private routing hid sandwich attacks. It didn't remove them.

More than 12,000 Ethereum wallets still get sandwiched every week. Defillama Research looks at why, and at how THORChain made the attack unprofitable at the protocol level years ago.

Not trying to shit on Thorchain or anything. Just wondering if for swaps and transfers inputs are publicly associated with outputs?

A new article on how THORChain swaps native $BTC for native $ETH, $SOL and more, and why BTC to ETH was its biggest route in Q1 2026.

THORChain now sends 20% of System Income to Protocol-Owned Liquidity and cuts the RUNE burn from 5% to 1%, putting more of its revenue to work inside its own pools.

https://blog.thorchain.org/how-thorchain-s-new-system-income-distribution-works

New piece on how THORChain settles BTC, ETH, SOL and more directly between their native chains.👇

https://www.ccn.com/thorchain-crypto-has-plenty-of-liquidity/

Roughly 1 in 3 THORChain swaps involve BTC. New chains are about to join the list.

Still betting on BTC, or is another chain catching up?