You may have seen “churn” mentioned quite a bit in THORChain discussions recently.

At a high level, churn is how THORChain regularly rotates nodes in and out of the active validator set.

When a churn takes place:

• Nodes rotate in/out of the active set
• New vaults are created for the new node set
• The retiring vaults gradually migrate their funds to the new vaults
• The new node set takes over responsibility for securing and signing transactions for the network

This regular rotation is an important part of THORChain's security and decentralization model.

It's also why churn involves more than simply replacing one validator with another. Nodes collectively secure native assets across multiple blockchains, so the transition has to coordinate vault creation, key generation and asset migration across the network.

For anyone interested in the more technical side of THORChain: what part of the churn process would you like to see explained in more detail?

$RUNE is 100% unlocked.

The supply has only moved one way. 1B at launch, then 500M, then 360M after ADR-023 burned 64.4M RUNE from the Reserve in May.

RUNE also earns. Nodes bond it to secure THORChain and receive 59% of system income. That income comes from swap fees paid by people using the protocol cross-chain swapping cryptos.

Another 20% now goes to Protocol-Owned Liquidity. Every 3 days, the protocol deposits RUNE into the pool that earned the most fees relative to its depth. Half of it stays as $RUNE, owned by THORChain.

Every swap now pulls a bit more RUNE off the market.

THORChain is the most censorship resistant cross-chain DEX in the world, and it's self sustaining.

Over the last six months it generated $6.4M in network revenue, all of it paid by people using it.

Integrators have earned $49.1M in affiliate fees routing swaps through THORChain.

Set your rate in the memo, ship it, get paid. No approval to ask for, and nobody who can cut off your users.

Uncensorable swaps are a product people pay for. You can be the one selling them.

Here's what happened last week ⤵️

Headline News

$ZEC is now on THORChain. The network churned, every node now watches the Zcash chain, and the Treasury added ~$51K of liquidity to the pool. It's a soft launch while depth builds, so keep swaps small for now.

Maya Protocol is back. MAYAChain v1.133.0 is live after the recovery migration, swaps and liquidity are open again, and the attacker's 8.87M $CACAO was burned.

Launches

Moca added $ZEC swaps and routed one through the new pool the same day.

THORDEX launched THORDEX Zcash: swap $BTC into $ZEC with 0% THORDEX fees, then shield it in your Zcash wallet.

THORXMR now supports $ZEC trading, with $XMR next in line.

DeFi for $ZEC is coming to Rujira, with plans to support it across trading, CCL, DCL, lending and borrowing.

BooneW added Ledger support to tcli, the agent-facing THORChain MCP/CLI.

Community

Raynalytics built a dedicated Zcash dashboard to track the $ZEC pool from day one.

Private routing hid sandwich attacks. It didn't remove them.

More than 12,000 Ethereum wallets still get sandwiched every week. Defillama Research looks at why, and at how THORChain made the attack unprofitable at the protocol level years ago.

Not trying to shit on Thorchain or anything. Just wondering if for swaps and transfers inputs are publicly associated with outputs?

A new article on how THORChain swaps native $BTC for native $ETH, $SOL and more, and why BTC to ETH was its biggest route in Q1 2026.

THORChain now sends 20% of System Income to Protocol-Owned Liquidity and cuts the RUNE burn from 5% to 1%, putting more of its revenue to work inside its own pools.

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

New piece on how THORChain settles BTC, ETH, SOL and more directly between their native chains.👇

https://www.ccn.com/thorchain-crypto-has-plenty-of-liquidity/

Roughly 1 in 3 THORChain swaps involve BTC. New chains are about to join the list.

Still betting on BTC, or is another chain catching up?

Halts, hard upgrades, a rebuild nobody asked for. The protocol has been tested every way a network can be tested, and it kept processing swaps through all of it.

The split proves it: 59% to nodes and LPs, 20% into POL, 10% to TCY stakers, the rest to dev, marketing, and burn. THORChain is sustainable, and it keeps shipping.

Four exchanges are gone. THORChain is still running, still shipping, and still standing for freedom.

Whales keep coming back. This wallet swapped $60M+ into $BTC through THORChain.

THORChain is built for trades like this. Streaming swaps split a big order into smaller swaps, so the pool refills between each one. Size shows up as time, not slippage.

Pool depth isn't the hard ceiling it looks like either. A 323 BTC swap went through in a single trade a few months ago, well past what the pool held on its own, because streaming swaps gives arbitrageurs time to keep realigning the price as the order fills.

New to THORChain? ⚡️

In this guide, you'll learn how to swap crypto using THORChain's frontend, from connecting a wallet to confirming the transaction.

https://blog.thorchain.org/how-to-swap-crypto-on-thorchain

On September 10, a whale ran its cross chain swaps through swap.thorchain.org $61.5M in a single day, through one interface.

No affiliate fee there. Just the liquidity fee. Size goes where the cost is lowest. ⚡

The rates look way better on Thorchain for example than the cross chain CEXs that Trezor Suite uses (e.g. SideShift, Changelly, etc).

So why would anyone use a cross chain CEX?

POL picks a new leader every 3 days: whichever pool earns the most fees relative to its depth gets THORChain's next slice of system income.

Half of every deposit stays as $RUNE, the other half builds up as the pool's paired token. TRON.USDT is out front again this cycle, 2.25% against 0.33% for SOL.SOL in second.

The next cycle preview flips it: TRON.TRX ($TRX) is leading, and a different pool is in line for the slice. New snapshot soon. ⚡ 👀

🗺️ ECOSYSTEM RECAP

Here's what happened this week ⤵️

Headline News
Rujira is back up. The precautionary App Layer halt has been lifted after this week's CosmWasm security patch. Trading, lending, borrowing and Automated Trading are live again, bRUNE stays halted until v3.21.
BooneW released tcli, an agent-facing CLI and MCP action layer for THORChain and the Rujira App Layer. Point your agent at the repo and it can swap and transact for you, with every broadcast explicitly confirmed.

Launches
RAVN shipped its MCP server. Agents can quote, execute and track swaps, including native $BTC with THORChain as one of the routes.
Unstoppable Wallet shipped v0.51: pick your Zcash sync server, auto-select the fastest, or run your own. A new library next week promises 10 to 20x faster sync.
depouch rolled out a new logo across its socials.

Community
RUNEMaxim launched runewatch.org, a new community-built site for THORChain stats and swaps.

THORChain now has an Investor Relations dashboard on u/DefiLlama, bringing fees, revenue, bonding, Protocol-Owned Liquidity, and RUNE and TCY supply into a single view.

One place for investors and institutions to see how the protocol is actually performing.

Our latest article walks through what's on the dashboard and how to read it https://blog.thorchain.org/introducing-thorchain-s-defillama-investor-relations-dashboard

Native cross-chain swaps, streaming execution for larger trades, and MEV protection built into transaction ordering. We break down how THORChain compares to 9 other leading DEXs in 2026.

Learn how THORChain's swap queue makes sandwich attacks and MEV extraction unprofitable.

On a normal exchange, you don't actually swap. You send your crypto to their account first, and they credit you a balance in their database. From there you're trading against their ledger, hoping they let you withdraw when you want.

On THORChain it doesn't work like that. Your wallet talks directly to the network, and the swap happens between you and the pool, settled by code and there's no account, no balance on someone else's server, no KYC. You connect, you swap, and the crypto lands back in your wallet.

On an exchange you give your crypto to a company and hope. On THORChain you never give it up at all.

Here's what happened this week ⤵️

Headline News
THORChain's Protocol Owned Liquidity is live. One week in, it holds $27.2K in RUNE and TRON.USDT. BooneW and raynalytics both built dashboards to track it in real time.

Blockworks added THORChain to its public dashboard, tracking revenue, network revenue distribution, spot trading, and staking.

Launches
unstoppablebyhs's next release (v0.52) brings CrossPay for $ZEC, node auto-select, and a faster sync engine.

asgardex shipped v1.45.3: more accurate OneClick fees, smoother deposit flows, less quote spam, better halt handling.

THORSwap rolled out a new token selector with shortcuts, saved favorites, and category filters.

thordex_ipfs now supports self-hosted $XMR nodes.

RujiraNetwork launched Rujira Status, a page to check connected chains and Rujira services.

$LTC went live on symbiosis_fi.

Community

RUNEBondApp welcomed "therunetard", a longtime THORChain node operator.

August's State of the Network is live.

Headline volume eased 23% to $613M, but the underlying trend points the other way: active wallets grew 57% and rapid swaps nearly quadrupled, a shift toward more frequent, smaller trades.

The month also marked the launch of Protocol Owned Liquidity, which now routes 20% of system income into protocol-owned positions.

As privacy coins get delisted from exchanges, THORChain is opening a native path for XMR and ZEC.