THORChain Quarterly Report - Q3 2026

Summary

THORChain processed approximately $3.82 billion in volume in Q3 2026 and generated around $5.77 million in fees, nearly double Q2 on both counts, in its first full quarter since the June 22 restart. September alone accounted for $2.41 billion as funds from the Bitget exchange hack moved through the network. Excluding those five days, volume and fees were still above Q2.

On the protocol side, v3.20 shipped in late August, bringing back validator churn after more than 60 days and activating Protocol-Owned Liquidity (ADR-024), which now receives 20% of system income. Dynamic fees (ADR-026) went live with ShapeShift, then Edge Wallet and Symbiosis, node operators approved affiliate revenue share (ADR-029), and ADR-031 confirmed the cooperation with Rujira. The quarter also included a two-day halt in late August and a stability sprint that put new launches on hold until mid-September.

THORChain also came under heavy public pressure to block the hacked flows and held to its position as neutral, permissionless infrastructure. Looking ahead, several chains are about to go live such as Zcash, Monero, TAO while ADR-030 (delegated node permissions) and base-layer limit orders are still under discussion.

A Look At Q3 2026 Metrics

General Metrics:

• Total USD Volume: $3.82B
• Highest 24h Volume: $467.74M
• Change in Total Liquidity: $54.58M to $89.82M
• Swap Fees Collected: $5.77M
• Affiliate Earnings: $1.38M
• Affiliate Volume: $1.42B

Top Swap Routes By Volume:

1. BTC <> ETH: $1.18B

2. BTC <> USDC: $466.66M

3. BTC <> XRP: $446.30M

4. BTC <> USDT: $267.83M

5. BTC <> LTC: $133.76M

Top Swap Routes By Swap Fees Collected:

1. BTC <> ETH: $2.51M

2. BTC <> XRP: $1.38M

3. BTC <> USDC: $989.4K

4. BTC <> USDT: $575.9K

5. BTC <> LTC: $319.1K

Top Affiliates By Swap Volume

1. THORChain.org - $545.76M

2. SwapKit - $208.55M

3. naswap - $92.96M

4. Trust Wallet - $87.66M

5. thor18dvg…kjm4 - $63.27M

What’s New On THORChain In Q3 2026

Network And Protocol Update

Network Back Online, With Exceptions

Validator churn stayed halted for more than 60 days after the June restart, until v3.20 went live in late August. Churn then resumed on a three-day cadence, and the active set went from 95 nodes in July to 103 at the end of September, with total bond up to 97.66M RUNE.

A few services were not yet back: Solana trading (which v3.20 started preparing to resume) memoless transactions, switched off in August after an attacker repeatedly registered short memo identifiers, and Rujira’s bond contract and its trading pair, kept disabled for additional checks when the App Layer resumed on September 3.

Protocol Upgrade v3.20

v3.20 was the quarter's main release, with 61 merge requests merged in v3.20.0 and 75 across v3.20.0 to v3.20.3. Beyond churn and POL, it shipped the Monero and FROST groundwork, Zcash NU6.3 support, fixes to resume Solana, BNB Chain and Base trading, memoless swaps for ERC-20s, an experimental Stable Reserve (disabled by default), the MOR token, and the ADR-030 code.

https://blog.thorchain.org/thorchain-protocol-upgrade-v3-20

Stability Focus

The weeks after v3.20 were dedicated to stability. On August 26 and 27, the network halted because nodes no longer agreed on its state. The cause was traced to Rujira App Layer contracts that could return different results on different nodes. A v3.20.1 hotfix followed, and the App Layer stayed paused until the issue was fixed, resuming by September 3.

From August 27, new launches were put on hold. Zcash, Monero and the SwapKit revenue share test were pushed back, but churns continued, and the first one after v3.20 cut average block times by about 300 milliseconds. The team also fixed a TSS signing issue with follow-up v3.20.x patches and began rolling out Router v6 one EVM chain at a time, starting with lower-risk routes.

The sprint ended on September 17, and THORChain returned to normal operation. It also produced clear guidelines for the App Layer: base-layer queries must give the same result on every node, contract execution must be bounded, and future incidents will follow a set process to halt, contact the affected team and agree on a restart path.

https://blog.thorchain.org/thorchain-puts-stability-first-monero-zcash-delayed-adr30-ai-agents-and-memoless-swaps

ADR-024: Protocol-Owned Liquidity - Executed

Protocol-Owned Liquidity went live with v3.20, which made the POL Mimir controls operational. Node operators set the POL share at 20% of system income, and the reserve deploys RUNE into eligible pools (L1 gas assets and approved stablecoins) ranked by their fees-to-depth ratio over three days. The first position went to the TRON.USDT pool. By the end of September, the reserve had deposited 946K RUNE, with positions worth about $679K and around $113K in fees earned.

Alongside POL, node operators cut the RUNE burn from 5% to 1% of system income in mid-September. System income is now split between nodes (59%), POL (20%), TCY (10%), the Dev Fund (5%), the Marketing Fund (5%), and the burn (1%).

https://blog.thorchain.org/how-thorchain-s-new-system-income-distribution-works

https://blog.thorchain.org/why-protocol-owned-liquidity-matters-for-thorchain

ADR-026: Dynamic Fees Live With First Partners

The dynamic minimum fee went live for whitelisted partners this quarter, starting with ShapeShift. Each partner's fee floor adjusts by 1 bp per day for each selected trading pair, based on fee revenue. A v3.20 update opened the mechanism to more partners, with node operators enrolling Edge Wallet and Symbiosis on September 26. Data is currently being tracked to assess the effectiveness of the mechanism over time.

https://blog.thorchain.org/adr026-dynamic-fee-model

ADR-028: Pool Reconciliation - Completed

v3.20 completed the residual remediation under ADR-028. The Migrate17to18 store migration finished the post-exploit pool reconciliation started in Migrate15to16: it removed phantom depth from 26 pools, reset 4 seed pools (BSC.USDC, BSC.USDT, BASE.ETH and ETH.THOR), and sent the freed RUNE to the Reserve rather than burning it.

https://gitlab.com/thorchain/thornode/-/merge_requests/4992

ADR-029: Affiliate Revenue Share - Passed

Node operators approved ADR-029 in August. REVSHARE lets THORChain return part of its liquidity fees to an approved affiliate THORName, set per THORName through a Mimir key and capped at 50% of the fees that affiliate generates. The payout is taken from system income before it is split, and no RUNE is minted. SwapKit is set to be the first partner tested, as outlined in What's Coming Next below.

https://blog.thorchain.org/adr-029-affiliate-revenue-share

ADR-031: Rujira Cooperation Confirmed - Executed

Node operators adopted Option 1 of ADR-031, confirming and reinforcing the exclusive cooperation with Rujira on the App Layer. THORChain provides Base Layer security and infrastructure, and Rujira builds the App Layer products. Rujira's revenue is now split three ways: 33.34% to a POL Fund owned 50/50 by Rujira and THORChain, 33.33% to THORChain, and 33.33% to RUJI stakers, which keeps THORChain's economic share at 50%.

On top, WasmArbSlipMinBps was set to 0 so the Virtualization Strategy can settle smaller trades more often and tighten quotes. ADR-031 also sets responsibilities in case of an exploit: smart contract exploits fall to Rujira, and Base Layer exploits affecting Secured Assets fall to THORChain.

https://blog.thorchain.org/adr031-the-path-forward-with-rujira

Monero Audit By Least Authority

Least Authority audited THORChain's Monero integration this quarter, with findings delivered in late August. By September 30, 7 remediation merge requests had been merged (5 public and 2 private security fixes), and the fixes will ship in v3.21 coming in October. Completing this remediation is the main gate before Monero goes live on mainnet.

Exploit Post-Mortem - Published

THORChain published two further reports on the May 15 exploit.

Exploit Report #2 (July 3) sets out the root cause: three individually low-severity weaknesses in the GG20 signing implementation, a fork of Binance's tss-lib that predated upstream fixes, which the attacker chained together by deliberately failing signing rounds 864 times over about two and a half days.

Exploit Report #3 (August 6), prepared by THORSec/Soda Labs, is the technical deep dive into the three bugs and the fixes now in production.

v3.20 added encryption at rest for TSS keyshares, and the medium-term plan remains to move off GG20, using FROST for Schnorr chains and DKLS for ECDSA chains.

https://blog.thorchain.org/thorchain-exploit-report-2

https://blog.thorchain.org/thorchain-exploit-report-3

THORChain Holds To Its Ethos Under Public Pressure

On September 24, Bitget lost about $387.5 million in a hack of its hot wallet infrastructure, and part of the stolen funds was swapped through THORChain over the following days. Between September 25 and 29, the network processed about $1.38 billion in volume, more than half of September's total.

The flows put THORChain at the center of a public debate. On September 26, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen asked THORChain to refuse service to the attacker's addresses, and OKX founder Star Xu argued that THORChain's ability to halt makes it an intermediary.

THORChain declined the request the same day and held its position throughout. It is a decentralized and permissionless network, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, with no mechanism to block an individual swap, sender, or recipient. Node operators can pause a chain or the network when solvency is at risk, and that halt applies to every user at once: a minority of one-third plus one can stop activity, while any protocol action requires a two-thirds supermajority.

THORChain also reminded that the same rule applied after its own May exploit, when the attacker's addresses were not blacklisted either, similarly to the Bybit and KelpDAO incidents. As Chad explained on Unchained, blocking flows fast enough would mean redesigning THORChain into a more centralized system which can be done if and only if the nodes decide to do it.

https://blog.thorchain.org/can-or-should-thorchain-censor-transactions

Partners And Integrations

Data Access

THORChain partnered with DefiLlama to launch an investor relations dashboard, giving an independent view of the protocol's fees and revenue, income statement, affiliate and integration leaderboards, swap activity and several more metrics.

Blockworks, which acquired Messari at the end of Q2, announced its THORChain dashboard, taking over the data previously covered by Messari. Work with Raynalytics, Dune and Numia also aims to move public data updates from daily to hourly.

Community member Boone also launched boone.tools, a set of 16 dashboards tracking pools, Protocol-Owned Liquidity, RUNE burns, node bonds, vaults, the Treasury, dynamic fees, governance votes and the App Layer, along with a comparison of THORChain's profitability against Chainflip and NEAR Intents.

https://blog.thorchain.org/introducing-thorchain-s-defillama-investor-relations-dashboard

https://blog.thorchain.org/introducing-boone-tools-a-better-way-to-understand-thorchain

Frontend

THORChain Swap added Exodus browser wallet support and Trezor support for XMR, and introduced an optional Houdini Swap private route, which runs through an off-chain intermediary separate from THORChain's native swap engine.

Integrators

RAVN: a native-asset aggregator in public beta that ranks quotes from more than 13 venues, including THORChain.

BazaarSwap: aggregates over 360 exchanges across 160 blockchains and settles trades natively through THORChain when it offers the best route.

depouch: routes swaps across THORChain, Maya Protocol and NEAR Intents.

NanoGPT: settles crypto payments for its AI models through THORChain.

What’s Coming Next On THORChain

New Chains Integration

Zcash is first in line: the integration is complete, and its pool will be created at the next successful churn, using Zcash's transparent UTXO infrastructure. Trading will start in October.

Monero will follow as a cautious soft launch with a ramp period of several weeks. Its code is in place and already trading on stagenet, node operators will get about three days' notice to enable it.

TAO is expected about six weeks after Monero, with DASH and Zano also in the pipeline.

V3.21 - Planned for October

v3.21 is being prepared. It targets a churn-related slashing regression along with App Layer and signing issues. Memoless transactions, switched off in August after an attacker repeatedly registered short memo identifiers, are also being redesigned, with a ramping registration price under consideration.

ADR-030: Delegated Node Operator Permissions - In Discussion

ADR-030 would let operators delegate routine actions (maintenance mode, leave requests, fee changes, bond-provider whitelist) to lower-privilege hot wallets while keeping the BondAddress cold. The code shipped in v3.20 and can be activated in v3.21, but the vote stood at about 37% support in early September, short of the two-thirds required.

SwapKit Revenue Share Test - Upcoming

With ADR-029 approved, SwapKit is set to run the first revenue share test in October. THORChain will credit 20% of the revenue from SwapKit-routed swaps to a bucket that SwapKit spends on better quotes. The test will run for one to three months and can be switched off if it doesn't benefit both sides.

Pushed back by the stability sprint, the test will start once SwapKit's side is ready. Success will be measured on net fee income: the discounts have to bring in enough new volume to more than offset the 20% share. The coming weeks should give a clear view of how well the design works.

Base-Layer Limit Orders - In Discussion

Node operator Devel has proposed base-layer limit orders (BLO), which would sit alongside AMM pools to improve quotes, execution speed, and refunds. The proposal would start narrow, with single-pool RUNE-denominated orders inside a 2% band around market price, and is being discussed alongside Rujira's Dynamic Concentrated Liquidity, now in testing.

Ongoing Work From Previous Quarters

Work also continues on initiatives from previous quarterly reports, including the migration from GG20 to FROST and DKLS, the Stable Reserve, and onboarding more partners to dynamic fees.

THORChain Quarterly Report - Q1 2026

THORChain Quarterly Report - Q2 2026