THORChain Q4 2025 Ecosystem Report & 2026 Roadmap
Q4’24 Report | Q1’25 Report | Q2’25 Report | Q3’25 Report
Summary
Q4 2025 processed $4.02 billion in volume across 1.22 million swaps from over 108,000 unique addresses, collecting $5.02 million in swap fees. Pool liquidity contracted from $186 million to $87 million as market conditions shifted. BTC↔ETH remained the dominant route at $1.46 billion in volume and $3.64 million in fees. SwapKit and the official frontend swap.thorchain.org led affiliate volume at $540 million and $534 million respectively. THORChain continues to be the largest bitcoin decentralized exchange.
The quarter's headline achievement was the launch of the Advanced Swap Queue with Limit Orders, enabling users to place limit orders on any asset pair through the AMM. The official frontend swap.thorchain.org went live, featuring memoless transactions that allow swaps without wallet connections—a major UX improvement powered by amount-based or address-based registration. Infrastructure hardened with intelligent recovery for failed outbounds, which now performs reverse swaps to return stuck funds to users in their original asset rather than requiring manual store migrations.
ADR-21 established a permanent marketing fund sourced from Treasury and 5% of protocol revenue, marking THORChain's shift from passive to active growth strategies. The x/scheduler module shipped foundational infrastructure for App Layer contracts to schedule callbacks, while quote endpoint optimizations delivered 82x performance improvements after Advanced Swap Queue activation. The near-term roadmap remains focused on Solana (February), ZCash (March), then Rapid Swaps - timelines subject to change.
A Look at Q4 2025 Metrics
Raynalytics Quarterly Dashboard | Thorcharts | Thorchain.net | RUNE Tools
- Total USD Volume: $4.02B
- Total Unique Swappers: 108.03K
- Total Swap Count: 1.22M
- Total Swap Fees Collected: $5.02M
- Pool Liquidity: $186.46M to $87.45M
Top Swap Routes by Volume:
- BTC <> ETH: $1.46B
- BTC <> USDT: $368.5M
- BTC <> USDC: $234.3M
- AVAX <> BCH: $159.77M
- BCH <> ETH: $147.65M
Top Swap Routes by Swap Fees Collected:
- BTC <> ETH: $3.64M
- BTC <> USDT: $733.21K
- BTC <> USDC: $550.52K
- AVAX <> BCH: $463.75K
- BTC <> RUNE: $404.87K
Top Affiliates by Swap Volume
- SwapKit: $540M
- swap.thorchain.org: $534M
- Ledger Live: $185M
- Trust Wallet: $165M
- Asgardex: $98M
- THORWallet: $92M
- Bitget Wallet: $84M
- LeoDex: $35M
- NativeSwap: $23M
- Edge Wallet: $20M
- Vultisig: $18M
- Gem Wallet: $6M
- Rango Exchange: $6M
- ShapeShift: $5M
What’s New In Q4 2025?
Q4 2025 THORNode version releases: 3.12 | 3.13 | 3.14
Official Frontend Beta Launch - swap.thorchain.org
THORChain’s new official front end went live on September 29, 2025. This interface prioritizes swaps through THORChain and does not charge an affiliate fee. This means the fees on THORChain are now competitive with centralized exchanges.
Now when you tell someone to “use THORChain” you can send them to this site and be sure they will actually be using THORChain.
The site went live with limited wallet support and only the ability to place swaps. Rather than build a fully functional site, and wait to release a final product, the team decided it’s better to release the interface in pieces as things get done. This enables the site to be tested by the whole community to help debug it before promoting it to the broader public.
A relatively larger update went through in late November that fixed numerous issues with connecting wallets, introduced memoless transactions, and dex aggregation. Shortly after this update, volume on the interface exploded higher, presumably due to fixing the wallet connection issues.
It was decided that dex aggregation will only include Maya Protocol. All swaps prioritize THORChain first, and will only be routed through Maya Protocol if the pool does not exist on THORChain or trading is halted. The API for this aggregator is free to use and free for any wallet to integrate.
The thorname for the interface is “STO” which some people have been using as shorthand to refer to the website.
Wallet screening will be added to the interface to try and prevent bad actors from using it. The THORChain protocol is permissionless and can’t censor transactions, however the official interface can aim to do so.
The website is open source and we encourage others to fork it and create their own custom swap interface from it. The goal is to try and make it as easy as possible for someone to clone the site, add their logos to it, and use a custom URL. Also in the works is a widget for websites to directly integrate the swap interface into their website.
Streaming swap settings, limit orders, and all the THORChain features for bond providers, node operators, and liquidity providers, will be added in the next quarter.
The official launch of the site is planned for Q1 2026 along with a refresh of the main website.
Advanced Swap Queue: Limit Orders
Both Limit Orders and Rapid Swaps are included in the new Advanced Swap Queue system. Limit Orders allow users to place a limit order for any two assets supported by the chain. The user specifies the minimum amount of the target asset they wish to receive for the amount of assets inputted. If the pool price shifts to accommodate the swap, their swap is automatically fulfilled through the AMM. This system isn’t a true orderbook, it’s enabling limit orders on top of the current architecture. Limit swaps were enabled in November 2025 and are still undergoing some minor bug fixes to be completed late January 2026 to be re-enabled.
Rapid swaps allow the end block to cycle multiple times per block, meaning that streaming swaps can execute significantly faster than before. Arbitrageurs on the network will adopt limit orders rather than replacing liquidity reactively, as they do for streaming swaps. This will allow very large swaps to be fulfilled almost instantly with much more accurate pricing vs the current model of streaming swaps. To be enabled in Q1 2026.
Memoless Inbound Transactions
Support was added for inbound transactions without using a memo, expanding THORChain's accessibility to wallets and chains with limited or no memo support. Users can interact with THORChain through two methods: amount-based registration (encoding a 5-digit reference code in the last digits of their transaction amount) or address-based registration (pre-registering their sending address with memo intent). This is particularly important for Bitcoin wallets without OP_RETURN support, ERC-20 tokens, and HD wallets. The implementation includes built-in protections against griefing attacks, a 24-hour time-to-live window for registered intents, and automatic refund handling to ensure users never lose funds due to registration errors.
Community developer FamiliarCow created a whitelabel API for interfaces to easily register transaction memos. Memoless is currently being used by the official frontend swap.thorchain.org to power swaps without connecting a wallet.
Inactive Vault Signing Fixes
Fixes were made to the inactive vault signing logic. If a user accidentally sends funds to a retired vault, THORChain attempts a best-effort refund so the funds aren’t lost. This logic was fixed to restore inactive vault refund functionality.
ADR:21 - Marketing Fund
The marketing team operates through a new entity called Berserk Marketing Ltd.The team includes third party service providers and a CMO hired to commence broad THORChain marketing efforts. Foundations were laid to commence several marketing strategies. This included kicking off a website redesign with CMS/SEO migration, the integration of analytics (GA4, Search Console, cross-domain tracking, redirect hygiene), and the standardisation of content operations across X, native blog articles, and other social media sites.
In parallel, the team commenced a strategy to improve how THORChain appears across the wider crypto internet by addressing directory and aggregator accuracy (e.g., CoinGecko/CoinMarketCap and other research/analytics destinations), and by building a PR and paid placement pipeline with narrative-led articles to support larger Q1 announcements (swap interface, light brand refresh, and Solana integration).
ADR-21 enables THORChain to start taking an active approach to marketing itself and stop relying on a passive approach. This proactive strategy will expand THORChain’s reach,by attracting new users, integration partners, and potential investors.
Add Cosmos x/Scheduler Module
The x/scheduler module that lets CosmWasm contracts schedule future callbacks to themselves. A contract specifies how many blocks to wait, and the scheduler calls it back when that height is reached. It's deliberately minimal - contracts decide their own cadence and logic. The key security constraint is that callbacks can only invoke the original sender, preventing contracts from authorizing actions just because x/scheduler is the caller. This is foundational infrastructure for Rujira app layer use cases like periodic settlements, time-delayed actions, or recurring jobs.
Quote Endpoint Performance Improvements
The THORNode Quote API experienced major slowdowns after the enabling of the Advanced Swap Queue. Improvements and optimizations were made for performance, resulting in an 82x speed increase in quoting.
Intelligent Recovery for Failed Outbounds
Intelligent recovery for outbounds that hit the Maximum Outbound Attempts was added. For failed swap outbounds, it now performs a reverse swap, sending the stuck funds back to the original sender in their original asset (e.g., if ETH→BTC fails, it swaps the BTC back to ETH and returns it to the user). For non-swap outbounds like refunds or ragnarok, it swaps to RUNE and sends to the treasury address for manual recovery. The system respects custom refund addresses from memos, uses no slip limit for best-effort execution, and falls back to treasury recovery if the reverse swap fails or original transaction details can't be retrieved, reducing the need of manual store migrations for recovery.
Limit Order Quote Endpoint
A new quoting endpoint for Limit Orders was added to help integrators make use of the new limit order functionality.
THORChain Roadmap:
Solana
PR
Currently on Stagenet, likely coming to Mainnet Late Q1 2026
ZCash
Likely coming to Mainnet Late Q1 2026, after Solana
Rapid Swaps
Rapid Swaps are not yet enabled on Mainnet. Will be enabled after stability of Limit Orders. Rapid Swaps are expected to greatly increase the execution time on streaming swaps, without sacrificing execution quality.
Router V6
The current EVM router is stateful and custodies all of the tokens on EVM chains including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Avalanche, and Base. The change to Router V6 will move asset custody to the L1 vaults and make the router stateless. This will allow Memoless Inbounds to support ERC-20 assets and save on costs. It also increases the gas limit, which will allow THORChain to swap into smart contract multisig wallets like Safe.
Other New Chains On Deck:
- TON
- Arbitrum
Opt In Chain Clients
Currently, all node operators must run daemons, observe transactions, and sign outbounds for all chains supported. With this change, new chains can be added by only a subset of nodes, allowing the network to continue to scale without the load and development effort required to support every chain by the entire network. This change has security implications: chains operated by a subset of nodes won’t have the same consensus strength as those supported by all operators, meaning there is less redundancy in how observations are confirmed.
Intents
THORChain doesn’t perform well with long tail assets due to its architecture. With the move to Secured Assets, THORChain has the capability to offer intents based markets, allowing providers to provide liquidity for assets outside of the pools. This approach eliminates the need to maintain liquidity pools for long tail assets and instead rely on third party liquidity providers to maintain pricing. This service will still accrue fees to the protocol, but allows more flexibility for the network to offer more assets for swaps without needing to maintain liquidity pools paired with RUNE.
Custom Affiliate Payout Thresholds
Affiliates can opt to get paid in their preferred asset. When they collect affiliate fees, RUNE is accumulated to their affiliate address. When it reaches a threshold (currently 200x the outbound fee of their preferred asset), the RUNE is swapped to the preferred address and sent to their L1 address. This change will allow the affiliates to customize the threshold at which they get paid, so they can get paid more or less frequently than the default and save on outbound fees.
Upgrade Threshold Signatures to DKLS
THORChain currently uses the GG-20 library for Threshold Signatures which secure the native asset vaults. The team is looking at upgrading this to DKLS, which requires much fewer coordination rounds between nodes. This should improve churn reliability, improve signing speeds, and also enable the network to have fewer Asgard vaults with more members which will decrease churn costs and increase vault security. Currently undergoing research.
Remove Memos from Outbound Transactions
THORChain is removing memo requirements from all outbound transactions, eliminating unnecessary on-chain data that adds gas costs and prevents transaction batching. Currently, every outbound includes a memo (OUT, REFUND, CONSOLIDATE, MIGRATE, or RAGNAROK), but these memos were originally added for debugging in early versions and were never reconsidered for removal. Since THORChain already uses five other parameters to identify outbounds (chain, vault pubkey, destination address, coin asset/amount, and in_hash), removing memos doesn't meaningfully increase collision risk. This optimization reduces blockchain bloat, lowers gas costs, and enables batched outbound processing across all supported chains.
2 Second Block Times
The development team is targeting a reduction in block times from 6 seconds to 2 seconds. This change will improve overall chain performance and accelerate streaming swaps. Architectural optimizations are underway to reduce chain bloat and reach the 2-second target. This change is approved and production-ready, but is de-prioritized given the risk profile weighed against other roadmap items.
What’s New In Q4 2025 on Rujira?
A lot has happened with Rujira throughout 2025 and in the last quarter, and for a full overview, you can read their own recap above. Let’s look at what they launched last quarter
Omnichain Upgrade
One of the core strengths of Rujira is its omnichain design and its ability to offer DeFi using native assets from all connected chains. While the foundations were already in place, the team recognized that the experience could still feel complex for users.
Toward the end of the year, Rujira rolled out a major UX upgrade that made a big improvement in how omnichain functionality is presented. The platform moved from a chain first approach to a token first model, allowing balances across different chains to be displayed as one unified balance.
Credit Accounts
Credit Accounts are going to be a key primitive for Rujira, and their launch has been one of the highlights of Q4. They sit at the core of the platform’s debt infrastructure and introduce a high level of flexibility in how borrowing and lending can be structured, which will be at the heart of its debt products.
RUJI Lending and Liquidations
With Credit Accounts live on mainnet, Rujira has enabled CDP loans and borrowing. At launch, users can borrow against six different collateral assets, including BTC and ETH.
The rollout was capped at $10,000 per asset while a Code4rena bug bounty was running. The bounty concluded on January 16, and the team is now addressing the findings, with plans to expand supported assets and lift caps so the system can begin scaling.
Debt naturally introduces liquidations, and Rujira has taken a different approach here. Liquidated loans can be purchased at discounts of up to 30% through tracking orders on RUJI Trade. Instead of liquidations being dominated by bots or captured by the protocol itself, participation is open to everyone, with equal access to bids.
Rujira is also preparing to deploy RUJI Liquidations, a dedicated interface for liquidation bidding. This UI will surface all the information needed to compete effectively, reinforcing the goal of making liquidation opportunities accessible rather than extractive.
What’s coming to Rujira in 2026?
Announcement
2026 will be the year of scaling for Rujira. The focus will be on building on top of the products and features they already have, and on scaling activity and volume across the platform.
There are many items on the Rujira roadmap, and below are the most important ones:
RUJI Lending and Liquidations
Currently, there are still caps on RUJI Lending and Rujira’s Virtualization Strategy, but these will be relaxed once the findings of their audit competition have been processed. This will create more room to borrow and allow more people to take out loans against their native Bitcoin and other assets.
Democratized liquidations are a big part of what makes Rujira unique, and a lot of work has already gone into RUJI Liquidations, the dedicated UI for bidding on liquidated assets. It will be an upgrade from their Kujira liquidation dashboard and will introduce new features like a heatmap, helping users make more informed decisions while bidding.
Custom Concentrated Liquidity
This will be the next major milestone for the team. The strategy is an upgrade to existing Uniswap v3-style concentrated liquidity. Users will not only be able to define the upper and lower bounds of their range, but also control how liquidity is distributed within that range, how far apart intervals are, and what portion of trading profits is retained and claimable by the LP.
Concentrated liquidity strategies are important because they place liquidity closer to the current market price instead of spreading it across a wide range where it is rarely used. This improves capital efficiency, leads to tighter pricing, and supports higher trading activity. For LPs, this means their assets work harder and generate more revenue without requiring additional capital. For traders, it results in a better overall experience and more volume across the platform.
It should also have a significant impact on THORChain base layer swaps, as it will provide a highly efficient source of liquidity for arbitragers to bring Base Layer pools back to market price and offer better quotes to users.
Compliant Privacy Layer
The Compliant Privacy Layer is coming to Rujira in collaboration with Redacted and will feature private accounts, exclusion lists, and Proof of Innocence. Users will be able to use native BTC, ETH, XRP, and other assets in a way that is both private and compliant, while still being able to access all the products the team is building.
The Redacted team is completing the final UI work and will soon enter the audit phase.
RUJI Perps v2
The team will work on Perps v2, which will use a peer-to-peer model similar to HyperLiquid, Aster, and Lighter. This model has proven itself over the past year and has become a major focus across the industry. While competition in the perpetuals space is strong, Rujira still has clear differentiators.
The system will be fully decentralized, with manipulation-resistant price feeds powered by Enshrined Oracles. Liquidated positions will be accessible to everyone through RUJI Liquidations, and the entire system will be tightly integrated with the rest of the Rujira product suite.
BTC backed Overcollateralized Stablecoin
Later this year, the team plans to launch their BTC-backed stablecoin, the successor to USK on Kujira. They learned a great deal from USK, both what worked well and what could be improved, and those lessons will directly inform the new design.
The key difference is that the stablecoin will be backed exclusively by BTC. This makes it a fully decentralized stablecoin that aligns closely with the original vision of crypto as peer-to-peer electronic cash.
As with CDP loans and Perps v2, liquidated positions will be handled through RUJI Trade, where users can bid and acquire BTC at discounts of up to 30%.
Where to get more information about THORChain?
- X Spaces — subscribe on RSS or wherever you get your podcasts
- THORChain Blog - educational content, regular posts, and monthly update articles
- THORChain Community - discord server
- GrassRoots Crypto — educational videos
Community
To keep up to date, please monitor community channels, particularly Telegram and X:
Website | Documentation | X | Telegram Community | Telegram Alerts | Community Discord | Developer Discord | Explorer | RuneScan | Reddit | Gitlab | Medium | Linktree | Thorcharts | RUNE Tools
New Socials:
Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | LinkedIn | YouTube
How to swap on THORChain?
Go to swap.thorchain.org
