THORChain listing process

2019-11-05 — 3 min read

An update on how new assets can be added to THORChain

Overview

As BEPSwap nears mainnet, the team are considering how to best manage the listing of new assets. The following has been considered.

Permissionless

The team and community believe strongly in this concept so anyone will be able to list a new asset. However, if 100’s of assets were listed at once, then each asset would be poorly discovered and would have liquidity problems. This can be solved by ensuring the asset goes through a small bootstrap period.

Ensuring Launch Liquidity

Each new asset listed must be have sufficient time to be priced correctly and with sufficient liquidity so that by the time swapping is activated, huge liquidity events don’t occur. This is also important because asymmetric staking is enabled, and the token shouldn’t be left to be incorrectly priced.

As such, each new asset is launched into “bootstrap” mode, where staking and withdrawals are enabled, but swapping is disabled.

Ensuring Asset Discovery

The last point is ensuring that the system allows new assets to be discovered and drives focus for new liquidity. If 100’s of assets were listed at once, then the community’s finite liquidity will be quickly diluted across many pools.

3-Day Asset Activation Cycle

The solution is to follow a 3-day activation cycle, where each new asset competes to be activated. Anyone can create a new pool, and stake in it, but the pool with the greatest depth (measured in Rune depth) will be the one activated.

In this way, the following is achieved:

Sufficient time in bootstrap mode to attract liquidity and ensure the price is correct
The asset with the greatest liquidity and interest will be activated for swapping
Spam/scam assets won’t attract much liquidity and may never be activated because any legitimate asset will supersede them
Each asset has 3 days of focus as a “new” asset to drive interest.
New assets compete for liquidity, driving value into Rune.

This logic will be built into the core THORChain logic and won’t be changed unless all the THORNodes agree to change it later. The actual logic is to add a new pool each 50000 blocks, which is around 3 days (but not exactly). At this rate, 120 Assets will be added each year. Assets aren’t added in order of chain, so even BTC.BTC will be competing for the launch cycle when that chain is added.

BEPSwap Launch Partners

BEPSwap launch partners and launch coins will be given an exclusive period of 42 days before the community will be able to add other assets. During these 42 days the coins will still be activated in order of Rune Depth in each asset, so the communities will be encouraged to stake to support their favourite assets.