LPU THORChain Updates (May 2023)

In this series, LPU aims to give regular condensed “state of THORChain” updates. Enjoy!

1. Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL) Enabled

The BTC Savers Vaults is now full, and thus time to enable POL so that Savers can continue scaling. Read here for a deeper explanation: https://crypto-university.medium.com/under-the-hood-single-sided-yield-protocol-owned-liquidity-a5ef725a5d7a

On 2-May, the POL Mimirs were enabled, and the initial maximum of 10k RUNE (controlled via POLMAXNETWORKDEPOSIT mimir) was quickly deployed into the BTC Pool without issue.

After updating for v1.109, max RUNE amount was gradually increased, first to 50k RUNE on 9-May, then to 500k RUNE on 16-May, 1m RUNE on 17-May and finally 5m RUNE on 21-May. At time of writing (end-May 2023), 4.27m RUNE has been deployed into the BTC pool.

https://thorchain.net/thorfi/pol

2. Node Voting to Increase Synth Caps to 60%

After the successful activation of POL, on 16-May, nodes were called to vote for increasing the Synth Caps from 50% to 60%.

The expected behavior is that once Synth Utilization >50%, POL will kick-in to drive the Synth Utilization back to 50%. But since POL addition is rate-limited, a Synth Cap of 60% will ensure always sufficient headroom for Synth minting by arbers to arbitrage smoothly.

On 22-May, the vote reached >67% consensus and MAXSYNTHPERPOOLDEPTH mimir was set accordingly.

3. Dynamic Outbound Fee Multiplier (DOFM) Adjustment

In last month’s ADR 008, it was proposed to reduce the outbound fee (especially relevant for expensive chains like BTC & ETH), and node voting reached consensus on 7-May. Thereafter, the MINOUTBOUNDFEEMULTIPLIERBASISPOINTS mimir was adjusted accordingly and at time of writing, outbound fees were generally halved vs previously.

Ref: https://twitter.com/thorchain/status/1656022685502038017

4. BTC Trading Halt for Due to Mempool Congestion

In the face of BTC high fees and mempool congestion, a double-spent occurred on 7-May, and the solvency checker automatically halted BTC trading.

Devs recommended to keep the trading halted until some tweaks to handle the mempool congestion were applied in v1.109.1 and v1.109.2. On 12-May, all patches were done and BTC trading was unhalted.

5. Trading Halt for v1.109 and v1.110 Update

Trading was halted briefly for around 4 hours each, on 8-May and 17-May, for updating to v1.109 and v1.110 respectively.

6. Lending Development

On 30-May, a Discord Spaces to discuss the upcoming soft-launch of Lending was held. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkq8gteNBvk

Some resources below:

https://crypto-university.medium.com/under-the-hood-lending-101-f934e1c22792

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaqHG00RJks

7. Binance Smart Chain (BSC) Integration

On 30-May, BSC was launched on Stagenet. Concurrently, a node vote to confirm adoption to mainnet was started.

Feel free to hop into the TC University Discord to chat about this, or any other THORChain questions that you may have.

Explore THORChain: Website, X, Telegram, Developer Discord.

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