State of the Network - July

July was the first full month of data since the restart. The network traded every day, and the numbers tell a story of normalization: volume settling into a range, fees steadying, yield rebuilding.

Monero and Zcash stayed queued behind the churn, but Chad signaled interest in removing that dependency for ordinary chain launches going forward. The less a new chain blocks validator-set operations, the healthier the protocol.

Volume and Fees 

General volume

July closed at $796.97M in total swap volume across a full 31 days of trading. That compares to $88.55M in June, which had roughly eight days of live activity. The month opened in a steady $10M to $20M band through the first week. Mid-month brought a lift: July 9 hit $38M and July 16 reached $50M, the first time the network saw sustained days above $30M since the restart. The range then tightened back to $12M to $20M through the third week before the 25th spiked at $75M, the biggest single day of the window.

July 26 dropped straight back to $10M, confirming it was a one-off event rather than a new baseline. The month closed with a final push on the 30th at $42M before settling back to $15M on the last day.

Rapid Swaps

Rapid swaps ran all July, adding $28.5M in volume across 7,467 trades. Daily volume spiked to around $1.2M to $1.4M on a few days, with the 25th hitting the month's high near $1.4M, while the quiet days dropped below $300K. The count followed the same rhythm, peaking around 550 swaps on the 11th.

Average trade size worked out to roughly $3.8K, consistent with rapid swaps being the small, fast end of the flow rather than whale trades.Fees collected

System income hit $922K in July, up from $187K in June. Daily fees mostly sat in the $11K to $28K range, with three bumps: $52K on July 10, $55K on July 15, and $95K on July 25, month's peak.

Fees collected

System income hit $922K in July, up from $187K in June. Daily fees mostly sat in the $11K to $28K range, with three bumps: $52K on July 10, $55K on July 15, and $95K on July 25, month's peak.

Dynamic Fees

Since ADR-026 went live, each affiliate's fee floor can adjust by one basis point per day, steered by whether the last move raised or lowered actual revenue. On competitive pairs, the floor eases down to win price-sensitive flow. On pairs where THORChain is the only real venue, it firms up. A single fixed floor at 10 bps can't do both.

The pilot launched on ShapeShift, and July was the first full month of data. Across the 3-month window, ShapeShift routed $2.4M in total volume through THORChain, generating $1.5K in fees at an average of 6.08 bps. The fee ratio bounced between 2 bps and 12 bps day to day, below the 10 bps standard on average, suggesting the loop spent more time competing than collecting. Volume came in pulses: a spike near $600K in late June and another around $400K in mid-July.

THORChain captured roughly 34% of ShapeShift's routed swap volume in July, edging out competing routes by a point or two. Chad framed it as encouraging but not conclusive. ShapeShift's volume is small enough that one or two large swaps can materially shift a monthly share, which is exactly why it was the safe place to begin.

Fee Capture

THORChain Fee Capture measures THORChain against the whole market, not just its own volume: system fees collected per $1B of global exchange volume, using CoinMarketCap spot plus Dune DEX as the denominator. A higher number means the network extracts more revenue per unit of activity.

July ran mostly between $200 and $800 per $1B, with a weighted average of $414. The standout is July 25, the same day everything else spiked: THORChain pulled $99,239 in fees against $66.83B of global volume, for $1,485 per $1B, the peak of the window. Total for the period was $978K in THORChain fees on $2.36T of global volume.

Fees by Chain

ETH, BTC, RUNE, and TRON led fee generation in July. Most days stayed under $30K total, with two spikes breaking $100K: one mid-month driven by RUNE, and one late in the month split between BTC and ETH.

TCY and RUNE Yield

RUNE's 7-day APR was the volatile line, peaking at 26.75% on July 16, right when volume hit its mid-month high of $45M. It cooled from there, dipping to around 13% by the 24th before lifting again toward month end.

TCY's 7-day APR stayed low, tracking between 2% and 8% and peaking at 8.68% around mid-July before easing. Up from June's 2% to 4.5% range.

TCY and RUNE Yield

RUNE's 7-day APR was the volatile line, peaking at 26.75% on July 16, right when volume hit its mid-month high of $45M. It cooled from there, dipping to around 13% by the 24th before lifting again toward month end.

TCY's 7-day APR stayed low, tracking between 2% and 8% and peaking at 8.68% around mid-July before easing. Up from June's 2% to 4.5% range.

Retention and User Acquisition

July added roughly 13.4K new wallets, a big step up from June's ~1K. The gap is straightforward: June only had a week of live trading, while July ran a full month. Total unique wallets now sit at 1,118,404, all-time.

Security and Supply

Bonds

The node set held steady at 95 active nodes all month, unchanged from June. That's a direct result of churn being halted for 49 days, which is to say the entire month of July. 

Average bond now sits at 951,592 RUNE, against a minimum of 343,159 RUNE and a maximum effective cap of 1,024,507 RUNE. Node APR averaged 17.92%, with the average node earning about 14K RUNE a month.

v3.20 is the release that will unpause the churn, and it's also the gate for Zcash and Monero to launch.

Burn

RUNE burn ran steady through July, mostly 1K to 6K RUNE a day, with the same July 25 spike that hit volume and fees: 11.6K RUNE burned that day, the month's high.

All-time, 1.99M RUNE has been burned, about 0.59% of circulating supply.

Frontends

Leaderboard by Volume

The affiliate board spread wider in July than it did during the restart week. swap.thorchain.org drove the most volume, near the top of the stack, almost every day.. The peak days each had a different driver: July 9 was carried by TrustWallet and SwapKit, July 16 by ShapeShift, SwapKit and swap.thorchain.org together, and July 24 almost entirely by THORChain’s frontend.

Key Takeaways

July was the first clean month since the restart, and it read like a network settling into its normal. Volume found a floor around $10M and only occasionally broke above it. Fees steadied. Yield rebuilt.

The dynamic-fee pilot produced its first real data and pointed the right way: 34% share on a small sample, with the mechanism doing what it was built to do, undercutting where flow was competitive and firming up where it wasn't.

If there are specific metrics or themes you want included in future editions, drop your requests in the comments. We'll add the most relevant ones next month.