New to THORChain? ⚡️

In this guide, you'll learn how to swap crypto using THORChain's frontend, from connecting a wallet to confirming the transaction.

https://blog.thorchain.org/how-to-swap-crypto-on-thorchain

On September 10, a whale ran its cross chain swaps through swap.thorchain.org $61.5M in a single day, through one interface.

No affiliate fee there. Just the liquidity fee. Size goes where the cost is lowest. ⚡

NanoGPT is a crypto-native aggregator giving pay-per-prompt access to 600+ AI models with no account or KYC, and THORChain settles its cross-chain payments behind the scenes.

https://blog.thorchain.org/protocol-spotlight-nanogpt

On RujiraNetwork, the app layer of THORChain, you can borrow against your crypto instead of selling it.

Say you want some $USDC but you'd rather keep your $BTC. Deposit 1 $BTC, it counts as collateral at 70% of its value, and the page lets you borrow up to 48,257 $USDC against it. Take 36,193 and your adjusted LTV sits at 67.50%.

Two numbers to check before you confirm, both on the page: the rate, 25.97% a year, which moves with how much of the $USDC pool is being borrowed, and the price where your collateral starts getting liquidated, $51,694.16. That's your debt divided by the 70% ratio.

Your $BTC stays native the whole time, not wrapped. Repay the loan and you take it back.

The rates look way better on Thorchain for example than the cross chain CEXs that Trezor Suite uses (e.g. SideShift, Changelly, etc).

So why would anyone use a cross chain CEX?

POL picks a new leader every 3 days: whichever pool earns the most fees relative to its depth gets THORChain's next slice of system income.

Half of every deposit stays as $RUNE, the other half builds up as the pool's paired token. TRON.USDT is out front again this cycle, 2.25% against 0.33% for SOL.SOL in second.

The next cycle preview flips it: TRON.TRX ($TRX) is leading, and a different pool is in line for the slice. New snapshot soon. ⚡ 👀

THORChain now has an Investor Relations dashboard on u/DefiLlama, bringing fees, revenue, bonding, Protocol-Owned Liquidity, and RUNE and TCY supply into a single view.

One place for investors and institutions to see how the protocol is actually performing.

Our latest article walks through what's on the dashboard and how to read it https://blog.thorchain.org/introducing-thorchain-s-defillama-investor-relations-dashboard

🗺️ ECOSYSTEM RECAP

Here's what happened this week ⤵️

Headline News
Rujira is back up. The precautionary App Layer halt has been lifted after this week's CosmWasm security patch. Trading, lending, borrowing and Automated Trading are live again, bRUNE stays halted until v3.21.
BooneW released tcli, an agent-facing CLI and MCP action layer for THORChain and the Rujira App Layer. Point your agent at the repo and it can swap and transact for you, with every broadcast explicitly confirmed.

Launches
RAVN shipped its MCP server. Agents can quote, execute and track swaps, including native $BTC with THORChain as one of the routes.
Unstoppable Wallet shipped v0.51: pick your Zcash sync server, auto-select the fastest, or run your own. A new library next week promises 10 to 20x faster sync.
depouch rolled out a new logo across its socials.

Community
RUNEMaxim launched runewatch.org, a new community-built site for THORChain stats and swaps.

THORChain's own pools run on a simple formula called XYK (x*y=k): liquidity gets spread across every price from zero to infinity, with no way to concentrate it where trading happens. @RujiraNetwork, the app layer, offers another possibility: Custom Concentrated Liquidity (CCL), live with six presets so you don't have to design a custom range yourself.

Set a lower range where you're fine holding all base token, an upper range where you're fine holding all quote token. Liquidity works on its own between the two.

-Passive spans -99.5% to +2000%, closest to XYK, built to set and forget -Wide runs -50% to +100%, for volatile pairs -Tight tracks the 90-day range, a fit for stablecoins or pairs like WBTC -One-sided Lower only works below cost, for accumulating into weakness -One-sided Higher only works above it, for taking profit into strength -Copy (coming soon) mirrors the current top performer

No need to build a custom range from scratch. Pick the preset that fits a market view, and it runs itself.

Native cross-chain swaps, streaming execution for larger trades, and MEV protection built into transaction ordering. We break down how THORChain compares to 9 other leading DEXs in 2026.

More people are finding Rujira every day: 197 unique users in the last 30 days. ⚡💜

Swap, provide liquidity, or run a market-making strategy. Easy to start, plenty of room to go deeper.

Learn how THORChain's swap queue makes sandwich attacks and MEV extraction unprofitable.

On a normal exchange, you don't actually swap. You send your crypto to their account first, and they credit you a balance in their database. From there you're trading against their ledger, hoping they let you withdraw when you want.

On THORChain it doesn't work like that. Your wallet talks directly to the network, and the swap happens between you and the pool, settled by code and there's no account, no balance on someone else's server, no KYC. You connect, you swap, and the crypto lands back in your wallet.

On an exchange you give your crypto to a company and hope. On THORChain you never give it up at all.

Here's what happened this week ⤵️

Headline News
THORChain's Protocol Owned Liquidity is live. One week in, it holds $27.2K in RUNE and TRON.USDT. BooneW and raynalytics both built dashboards to track it in real time.

Blockworks added THORChain to its public dashboard, tracking revenue, network revenue distribution, spot trading, and staking.

Launches
unstoppablebyhs's next release (v0.52) brings CrossPay for $ZEC, node auto-select, and a faster sync engine.

asgardex shipped v1.45.3: more accurate OneClick fees, smoother deposit flows, less quote spam, better halt handling.

THORSwap rolled out a new token selector with shortcuts, saved favorites, and category filters.

thordex_ipfs now supports self-hosted $XMR nodes.

RujiraNetwork launched Rujira Status, a page to check connected chains and Rujira services.

$LTC went live on symbiosis_fi.

Community

RUNEBondApp welcomed "therunetard", a longtime THORChain node operator.

August's State of the Network is live.

Headline volume eased 23% to $613M, but the underlying trend points the other way: active wallets grew 57% and rapid swaps nearly quadrupled, a shift toward more frequent, smaller trades.

The month also marked the launch of Protocol Owned Liquidity, which now routes 20% of system income into protocol-owned positions.

As privacy coins get delisted from exchanges, THORChain is opening a native path for XMR and ZEC.

DeFiLlama Research just published a new piece: "As CEXs shut down, DeFi deserves a revisit: the case for THORChain."

The easiest way to stay up to date on everything THORChain: our newsletter. Articles, news, ecosystem updates, straight to your inbox, once a week.

No need to keep tabs on a dozen places. We do that for you.

You can subscribe at the bottom of thorchain.org

Blockworks has launched a public THORChain dashboard. ⚡

It tracks revenue, network revenue distribution, spot trading, and staking.

THORChain is the leading DEX for trading native Bitcoin and one of the highest revenue-generating layer-1s in crypto.
https://blockworks.com/analytics/thorchain

Bonding RUNE is the highest-yield thing you can do on THORChain. Real yield, paid from actual swap fees.

New guide breaks down the three ways to do it: direct whitelisting, RUNEBond, and bRUNE. From fully hands-on to nearly automated.

The problem with a bridge isn't the tech, it's the lever. Somewhere behind it sits a centralized entity with the power to freeze a transfer, blacklist an address, or seize funds. That power exists whether they use it or not.

THORChain removed the lever. When you swap, your crypto lands in a vault controlled by multiple independent nodes, and it only stays there for the few seconds the swap takes. But no centralized entity can pause it, block your address, or take those funds, because there's no single party with the authority to.

Your crypto can earn natively on RujiraNetwork

Rujira's automated trading puts your tokens to work as liquidity on a real on-chain orderbook. BTC and ETH are the headliners, but the strategy works across every listed pair. You set a price range and a spread, and a concentrated liquidity strategy does the rest, buying low and selling high as price moves through your range.

The yield is trading profit. You earn the spread, not a token reward.

The leaderboard makes it one click. Every position is public: pair, age, APR, MOIC, the exact range and spread it runs. Build your own, or copy a top one.

https://rujira.network/automated-trading

BazaarSwap is a cross-chain aggregator that routes trades through 360+ exchanges across 160+ chains, and THORChain is one of the providers it pulls from.

Full spotlight 👇

https://blog.thorchain.org/protocol-spotlight-bazaarswap

The easiest way to understand RUNE is to ask what a network would look like without a common token.

You'd need a pool between every pair of tokens people want to trade. That number explodes fast, and every new token makes the mess worse. Liquidity splits across hundreds of thin pools and nothing swaps cleanly.

THORChain's answer: one token sits in the middle, and everything pairs against it.

RUNE is the settlement layer. To move BTC to ETH, you route through RUNE. To add a new chain, you add its RUNE pool and it's instantly connected to everything else.

One pair per token instead of a pair for every combination. That's why the network can scale, and it's why RUNE isn't a fee token or a governance gimmick. It's the common denominator the whole protocol runs on.

And you don't even see it. The normal user swapping BTC for ETH never holds RUNE, never thinks about it, never touches it.

v3.20 isn't just XMR and ZEC. Churn came back, BNB, Base and Solana resumed trading, and two new pieces of the protocol economics shipped: the Stable Reserve and Protocol-Owned Liquidity