THORChain Eyes Trading by Midweek: Chad Maps the Final Restart Steps, With Zcash and Monero Queued

2026-06-11 — 10 min read

Podcast

THORSday Community Podcast #207 ft. @CBarraford, @KentonC137 & @Patriotsounds | June 11, 2026 | Watch the full episode on YouTube

By @Raynalytics

TL;DR

v3.19.1 hits nodes Friday or Monday with the Gaia infinite-mint patch and verify-key stability work; the churn follows, and Chad would be surprised if trading isn't back by next Friday, leaning Tuesday or Wednesday.
The chain pipeline fires right after restart: Zcash within a week or two, Monero in the first half of July, Bittensor's $TAO and Dash behind v3.20.
Kenton floated a fixed fee split: 50% to nodes, 25% to Protocol Owned Liquidity, pendulum retired. Chad would rather redirect the 5% burn into POL too.
A live Nakamoto coefficient check put THORChain around 15 by unique operator addresses, top 10 on Chainspect's leaderboard.

1. The Restart Timeline: v3.19.1 and the Final Churn

Denny opened by thanking the community for staying calm through the pause. Nodes adopted v3.19 early in the week: TSS patches, extra protections, and a new verify-key function that confirms the network's keys are solid. Verify-key has been flaky (a hundred independent operators will do that), and a couple of nodes appear to have deleted their key shares. Those sit backed up on chain, triple encrypted; restarting Bifrost re-pulls them. Still:

"Operators, please don't delete your key shares. Didn't think I needed to say that, I thought that was kind of obvious, but please don't do that." (Chad)

v3.19.1 closes the chapter with two fixes: verify-key stability, plus a patch for an infinite-mint bug Chad spotted on the Gaia side through an IBC-related issue (why Gaia was halted). It should reach nodes Friday if things go well, otherwise Monday. Gaia resumes, the churn happens, and that solves the root of the exploit. Chad won't let verify-key delay it: the team is 99.9% sure nothing else is lurking.

From there: roughly six hours for the churn, an hour of validation, then under a day to re-enable signing, trading, LP actions, and trade/secured asset movements. Trading by next Friday? "I'd be surprised if it wasn't next Friday," Chad said. "I would lean more towards Tuesday, Wednesday."

One ask for node operators: stay online and at the tip of every chain; keygen and verify-key need 100% participation, not the usual two-thirds.

2. The Chain Pipeline: Zcash in Weeks, Monero in July

The chain team's Wednesday meetings are back, and the queue is stacked. After the first churn, the Zcash change ships enabled by default in node launcher, the next churn creates Zcash-capable vaults, and the Treasury seeds the pool: live within a week or two of the network coming back. Monero is right behind, testing smoothly, targeting July 1 to July 15 for $XMR on mainnet. Then come Bittensor's $TAO, needing a change that ships with v3.20 roughly six weeks out, and Dash alongside it. Longer term, Chad wants chains launching in parallel, assembly-line style.

Integration partners haven't blinked: Layer 1s still want listings, and two or three new interfaces keep asking when trading resumes. Stack on the dynamic fees and revenue share already shipped in v3.19, and the post-restart window looks dense.

"We're gonna have this terrible event, and then we're gonna get online and within a month or so all these positive things happening. It's gonna give people whiplash. I thought THORChain was dead, they got hacked, now they're doing so well." (Chad)

3. Affiliate Page, Widget, and an Easter Egg

Kenton's week: housekeeping plus shipping. An update to THORChain Swap added a page for pooling and creating a THORName, though it introduced a bug where language settings don't carry across pages; a fix is coming. There's also an Easter egg hidden on the swap interface. Kenton wouldn't say more, but last week's episode has the clue.

Next is a password-protected affiliate page. Projects sign up with an email, project name, website, and Telegram handle; Kenton and Randy approve; an API key and dashboard follow for setting a THORName, address, and fee, plus an earnings tracker. The dashboard also spits out copy-paste widget code so any website can embed a pop-up THORChain swap window. Affiliate page within a week, widget a week after. The recurring surprise for new affiliates: payouts are automatic and permissionless, straight to their address.

Next after that: Keplr support fixes and two-way secured asset moves (today it's secured asset to L1 only). Launch-week note: the new site weathered a bot-traffic flood the Sunday after going live; Kenton hardened it, and Chad's BadgerDAO callback reminded everyone that front ends are attack vectors too.

4. POL, the Burn, and Free Stablecoin Swaps

Kenton's big pitch was Protocol Owned Liquidity: fix the fee split at 50% to nodes and 25% to POL (versus 75% today) and retire the incentive pendulum. One constant beats two variables trying to balance each other.

Node operators can offset the cut by raising their operator fee on bond providers by about a third, Kenton figures, say 15% to 20%; Boone countered it takes a 50% bump, and the nerd fight was on. And a message for bond providers:

"Do the math to see how much your node operator is getting. You want him to maintain the servers, own the bare metal, pay attention to Discord, participate in governance, watch the alerts... and he's making five hundred bucks a month. Come on, bond providers, you gotta be more realistic." (Kenton)

Node operator Devel wants POL "as high as possible." Kenton noted he's arguing against his own pocket as an operator and fund manager: deeper pools mean more volume, more revenue, more buy pressure on $RUNE.

On the burn, Chad would rather kill the 5% and redirect it to POL, calling the burn "more of a psychology hack" with little price impact at current volumes. Kenton considers POL a better burn anyway, though if nodes keep it he'll lobby Messari and Token Terminal for a deflationary token index so $RUNE gets credit.

Also brewing: free stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps as a loss leader. An aggregator Kenton met that morning does 60-80% of its volume in stables and loved it; Chad warned it's hard to do without losing money and will run designs by JP.

5. The Live Nakamoto Coefficient Experiment

Kenton followed up with Chainspect, the decentralization leaderboard Chad flagged, got quoted $35,000 a year to list THORChain, countered at $3,500, heard back $5,000, and passed for now. The next listing spend: roughly $10,000 for $TCY's historical price data on CoinMarketCap.

Then, a live experiment. Chad shared his screen (after Denny told him to minimize the OnlyFans first) and the crew picked it apart. Polkadot tops it at 178, which nobody believed. Ethereum sits at 1 (Chad's guess: Lido's stake against a one-third disruption threshold). Bitcoin lands around 4 via mining pools. NEAR's listed 9 confused everyone until the crew untangled NEAR Protocol from NEAR Intents live (nobody dissing NEAR, Denny clarified, they just want accurate data); the fix: get FamiliarCow on to educate them.

Chad then ran THORChain's number live: 46 unique operator addresses across 92 nodes puts the coefficient around 15, top 10 on the board. Even halved to 8 for multi-node operators it's top 20, and his most conservative read of roughly 5 still clears 21st-place Sonic at 4. His tip: run all your nodes from one operator address so the network spreads them across vaults, blunting sybil attacks.

The crew liked the idea of charting the coefficient over time and immediately volunteered Ray to take on new dashboard requests.

6. Claude, Sanctions, and the AEO Game Plan

The episode's biggest discussion came from a listener: Anthropic's Claude speaks well of THORChain, but flags it as a high sanctions risk. Can the community fix that?

Kenton's answer is AEO, answer engine optimization, already his mandate: feed the models accurate THORChain content through blog and third-party articles, built over months like SEO. His caveat: AI tells you what you want to hear; take it with a grain of salt.

Chad searched live and found the likely culprit: no articles claim THORChain is or will be sanctioned, only stories about sanctioned entities like Lazarus Group and Garantex using it. A model pattern-matching "THORChain" near "sanctioned" does the rest.

The machinery is real. Kenton hired MarketAcross for PR (their advice: stay quiet until trading resumes), roughly 12 articles are queued with Lemur Labs, and since AI loves lists and tables, expect comparison pieces putting THORChain next to Chainflip, NEAR, and Uniswap. "We're playing the game."

"Your balls have to drop from your body at some point. At what point do you acknowledge that the sanctioners are the problem? Just because you are sanctioned doesn't mean you're doing anything bad." (Kenton)

Kenton frames crypto networks as digital nation-states sanctioners can't actually touch. Chad's practical layer: THORChain churns vault addresses every few days, so an OFAC-style blacklist like the one aimed at Tornado Cash needs constant updates to keep pace.

The hardest question came from a node operator: what if Tether or Circle froze funds in a vault? Those pools pause, their LPs lose the frozen half, the network carries on. Chainflip, by contrast, runs $USDC as its base asset in every pool, making a Circle freeze existential. "We don't bend the knee to Circle or anybody," Chad said; a freeze would suck, but "it's not gonna kill us by any stretch."

Kenton doubts it happens: real issuer competition means a freezer invites a bank run on itself, and if one lands anyway, that's the canary in the coal mine, the signal to be in the sanctioned system. He dropped two Andreas Antonopoulos videos on traditional finance laundering money by design.

One last AI beat: Denny flagged reports (from memory, he cautioned) that Anthropic's new Fable 5 had been jailbroken into code-security work it should refuse. Chad wasn't surprised: prompts are hard to secure, and Anthropic says its day-one limits are deliberately broad.

7. Double TSS, Over-Engineering, and Huginn's Audit of Serai

Denny circled back to the double-cryptography idea: pairing GG20 and DKLS so two signature schemes secure the same funds. Chad's path would be migrating to DKLS first (the stronger design), then adding GG20 back as a multisig second signer, but that adds multisig where THORChain has none, and complexity breeds fragility. Kenton's oil-and-gas version: every "and" in a plan multiplies the ways it fails. One for the security team post-restart.

Huginn, Chad's AI triage agent, meanwhile had a productive week. Generalized beyond THORNode, it now scans THORNode, the TSS code, Serai (Luke Parker's custom FROST implementation for Monero), and even its own codebase, effectively self-improving. On Serai it flagged roughly 60 issues, mostly P1s, no P0s. Chad won't "blindly throw AI slop" at Luke: he'll validate, patch the real ones, and open PRs upstream, as is customary in open source. Denny noted it should help mend that relationship too.

Takeaways / What to Watch

v3.19.1 reaches nodes Friday or Monday; if the churn goes smoothly, trading could be back Tuesday or Wednesday.
Zcash within a week or two of restart, Monero in the first half of July, $TAO and Dash behind v3.20.
Affiliate page within a week, embeddable swap widget about a week behind.
The 50/25 fee split and burn-versus-POL are proposals, not decisions; expect more debate.
There's an Easter egg hidden on THORChain Swap. Last week's episode has the clue.
Saturday's guest: Nano-GPT, the pay-per-prompt AI aggregator with crypto payments.
Moca, the point-of-sale app sourcing volume from THORChain and Maya Protocol, presents at the Litecoin Summit in Amsterdam, June 22-23.
Want to run a node? Reach out to Runetard for setup help and bond-provider matching.