Cross-Chain Curve: Orbital Pools on THORChain App Layer

Stablecoins play a critical role connecting legacy finance to new on-chain economies, yet fragmentation still persists. Stablecoins have rapidly evolved into a foundational layer for digital finance, with over $35 trillion in on-chain transfer volume in the past year- surpassing the combined annual volume of Visa and Mastercard. As the total stablecoin supply approaches $225 billion, adoption is accelerating across both consumer and institutional channels. New corporate, ecosystem, and sovereign stablecoins are launching across Ethereum, TRON, Solana, XRP Ledger, and more; active wallets have grown to 30 million, while business-to-business stablecoin flows now exceed $36 billion annually. Major corporations including Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, and Bank of America are actively integrating stablecoins into their payment infrastructure to reduce costs and settlement friction. With over 25,000 merchants accepting stablecoin payments and dozens of new issuances launching across chains, the demand for seamless, capital-efficient stablecoin infrastructure is exploding.

However, to swap between stables on various chains, users are forced to bridge and then swap and are subject to fees for each.

What if stablecoins across all chains could be unified into one capital-efficient, cross-chain liquidity pool?

Using THORChain’s native vault model and CosmWasm AppLayer, Orbital Pools make it possible to pool: ETH.USDC, ETH.USDT, TRON.USDT, BASE.USDC, XRP.RLUSD, NOBLE.USDN and much more in a single orbital AMM, while preserving their native-layer custody and composable execution.

Introducing Orbital Pools:

Orbital Pools are a novel financial primitive delivering Curve-style stablecoin swaps across chains unlocking deep, composable liquidity for the next era of global settlement. The Curve AMM proved the utility of like-asset pools for yield, routing, and stability in Ethereum’s DeFi stack. But billions in stablecoin activity now occur outside EVM chains. While Curve is native to Ethereum and EVM compatible chains, no crosschain solution currently exists.

Orbital pools on TC extend Curve-style stablecoin AMMs to a cross-chain context, powered by THORChain’s TSS vaults and AppLayer. Inspired by Paradigm’s Orbital AMM and brought to life by the Rujira team, Orbital Pools allow like-asset stablecoins to be pooled across chains in a capital-efficient, composable manner.

Who is this for?

Swapper: Anyone looking to swap between like-asset across chains can do so easily from their favorite wallet.

Yield Seekers: Liquidity Providers interested in in-kind yield can provide concentrated liquidity at their risk preference earning like-asset yield with minimal IL risk.

Developers: AppLayer projects seeking stablecoin yield or stablecoin derivatives can leverage LP-tokens to build novel products

Impact
Stablecoin swap volumes are massive and orbital pools on THORChain can unlock net-new orderflow that can drive revenue growth while providing massive utility for users.

How It Works

THORChain-Powered Settlement
At the core of Orbital Pools are THORChain’s Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) vaults — decentralized key management systems that hold native assets across chains without wrapping or bridging. These vaults allow Orbital Pools to custody and swap stablecoins on multiple blockchains natively. When a user swaps USDC on Ethereum for USDT on Avalanche, Orbital executes the trade atomically across native chains using THORChain’s settlement layer — ensuring trustless and final settlement.

Orbital Curves for Stable Pairs
Orbital Pools adopt orbital bonding curves — a generalization of Curve’s stableswap model. This approach allows the AMM to maintain deep liquidity and low slippage near the peg, while providing flexibility in adjusting the shape of the curve for varying asset correlations. Unlike traditional constant-product models, orbital curves optimize trade pricing specifically for like-kind assets, ensuring tight spreads and efficient capital utilization.

Orbital pools can apply to any like-asset basket such as BTC.BTC, BASE.cbBTC, ETH.wBTC and beyond.

Orbital AMM Mechanics

Orbital takes design cues from Paradigm’s Orbital AMM framework, which focuses on minimizing slippage and maximizing capital efficiency for assets that tend to trade near a fixed ratio (e.g. 1:1 stablecoins). Orbital AMMs introduce mechanisms for dynamic liquidity allocation along a price curve — devs have extended this to a cross-chain context, allowing trades like USDC ↔ RLUSD or USDT ↔ DAI across different networks with minimal impermanent loss and slippage.

Composable AppLayer Architecture

Rather than relying on monolithic contracts or bridge-specific logic, Orbital Pools are built on AppLayer — a modular, smart contract orchestration layer on THORChain. AppLayer allows the core logic of Orbitals (pooling, pricing, routing) to be abstracted and upgraded independently from the settlement infrastructure. This architecture makes Orbitals highly composable: aggregators, wallets, and DeFi apps can plug into Orbital liquidity across chains without needing to build cross-chain infrastructure themselves.

Follow the progress here: https://gitlab.com/thorchain/rujira/-/tree/feat/orbital-pools/contracts/rujira-orbital

Devs are excited for a Q4 2025 soft launch!

Acknowledgments

1. Orbital AMM — Paradigm (White, Robinson, Moallemi) source
2. Artemis x Castle Island Report — Documenting real-world stablecoin settlement growth, source