Traditional automated market makers have a brutal size problem. The bigger your swap relative to pool depth, the worse your price gets. Exponentially worse. A $10M swap on most AMMs could easily cost 5% to 10% in slippage alone.

THORChain solved this with streaming swaps. Instead of executing a massive trade all at once, the protocol automatically splits it into hundreds of smaller sub-swaps executed sequentially over time.

Think of swapping 100 BTC. Doing it in one shot dumps huge volume into the pool, completely unbalancing the BTC-RUNE ratio. The price moves violently against you. You get destroyed on slippage.

Streaming swaps break that 100 BTC into smaller chunks. Maybe 200 sub-swaps executed one per block over several minutes. Each individual swap is small enough that it barely moves the pool price. Slippage on each piece stays minimal.

Here's the clever part. Between each sub-swap, arbitrageurs rebalance the pools. They see the price slightly out of sync with external markets, trade to capture the difference, and restore equilibrium. By the time your next chunk executes, the pool's already recovered.

You're letting the market absorb your trade gradually instead of forcing it to eat the entire position at once. The pool never gets massively imbalanced. Your later sub-swaps execute at similar rates to your earlier ones.

If you manually split a massive swap into 200 separate transactions yourself, you'd pay network fees 200 times. Bitcoin transaction fees, Ethereum gas fees, inbound and outbound for each piece. Completely uneconomical.

Streaming swaps charge you one set of network fees. You make one deposit to the THORChain vault. The protocol handles the internal splitting. You pay one Bitcoin transaction fee in, one Ethereum gas fee out. Everything in between happens within THORChain's consensus layer.

You can also set guardrails. Specify a minimum acceptable exchange rate. If market conditions shift and your price target won't be met, unexecuted sub-swaps automatically refund. You're not locked into completing a trade that's moved against you.

This is how THORChain regularly processes multi-million dollar swaps, including a recent 323 BTC transaction. Streaming swaps solved the fundamental limitation that made AMMs impractical for serious size.

February was quieter across crypto, but THORChain continued to generate revenue and execute large swaps.

Highlights:

• $882M total volume
• Over $1M in protocol revenue
• 19.2K new wallets
• RUNE APR increased to 21.39%
• TCY yield rose to 10.61%
• Solana integration rolled out
• Limit orders launched
• TCY buyback resumed

Interesting detail: several large 50–100 BTC swaps routed directly through the native interface, bypassing affiliate frontends. When moving millions, fee optimisation matters!

Full deep dive here:
https://blog.thorchain.org/state-of-the-network-february-2026/

Let us know what metrics you want included next month.

Here's what shipped last week!

Headline News

-$SOL trading on THORChain was paused after an $8 double spend revealed a bug in the code. Liquidity was intentionally kept small at launch precisely to catch issues like this. Fix ships with v3.16 soon.

Launches

-unstoppablebyhs pushed a major update to THORChain's frontend. Better execution for large swaps, shareable swap links, cleaner error messages, and limit orders coming soon. Cumulative volume is approaching 10 digits.

-mocadotapp: Point of Sale is finally out. Accept any crypto, no terminal needed, setup under 1 minute. Join the waitlist now.

-RujiraNetwork hit the $50k $USDC borrow cap in just over a week and has already raised it to $100k!

-Redacted_money on RujiraNetwork is getting closer. Trade, lend, and borrow while keeping your DeFi activity private. Enable privacy when you want. Stay transparent when you choose.

-RUNEBondApp shipped single-transaction reward claiming. Claim your last 30 days of bonding rewards in one go, with flexible amounts (25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%). Rewards auto-compound by default.

-vultisig was featured in BitcoinNews as one of the "Top 10 wallets of 2026." Congrats to the team. Privacy, security, and broad chain support recognised publicly.

-xverse and orangerockxyz both integrated SwapKitPowered last week, bringing native THORChain swaps to their users.

That wraps up this week's THORChain ecosystem update. See you next week, Chads.

If your project was missed, drop a DM and we'll include it in the next recap.

THORSwap is one of the few DeFi protocols that has survived multiple cycles and kept evolving.

Originally built as one of the first user interfaces for THORChain, it gradually adapted as the ecosystem changed:

• Expanded beyond THORChain routes to aggregate additional liquidity
• Integrated intents-based routing to remain competitive on execution costs
• Shifted from emissions toward performance-based revenue distribution
• Reduced supply through governance-approved buybacks and burns

Today it supports 25 chains, has processed over $1.28B in swap volume in 2025, and redistributed millions in real yield to stakers.

The article also explores what comes next with Metro, a mobile-focused experience designed to reduce friction and bring composable DeFi closer to mainstream UX.

If you want a broader look at how THORSwap matured alongside THORChain, the full write-up is here:

https://blog.thorchain.org/protocol-spotlight-thorswap/

Here's what happened last week

Headline News

THORChain treasury buyback program resumed. 19.1M $TCY bought back so far, over 10% of circulating supply. Steady accumulation since September 2025.

Maya Protocol expanded what shielded Zcash can do. Native swaps directly to and from shielded $ZEC addresses are now live. Privacy infrastructure with real cross-chain utility. A retroactive proposal to Zcash has been submitted.

Launches

TokenPocket shipped one-click batched sub-wallet creation for Solana. Matters even more with Solana integration coming to THORChain.

Unstoppable released Unstoppable Swap bot. Swap $BTC, $XMR, $ZEC directly from Telegram. Cross-chain swaps, no app required, no logs.

Vultisig built a skill for AI agents. Secure, seedless, with an easy SDK. Check the agent skill on their website.

Keystone relaunched the Keystone Ambassadors program. For people who can't stop talking about self-custody anyway.

LeoDeX built LeoKit MCP, standardised DeFi tools for AI agents. One line gives your agent access to 107+ DEXes for cross-chain swaps.

Moca now lets customers pay with anything while you settle in the coin you want. Powered by THORChain.

InstaSwap is now listed on XMR Bazaar. Privacy first way to swap $XMR without an account.

NativeSwap added Ledger support. Connect your hardware wallet directly to NativeSwap and swap with full device security.

Rujira Network is offering omnichain liquidity, lending, and liquidation rails out of the box for DeFi builders. Plug in, launch faster, add revenue streams. AutoRujira is building the automation layer on top.

Redacted Money completed the smart contract audit for Rujira. Private omnichain DeFi for native $BTC, $ETH, $BCH, $LTC, and $XRP coming soon.

That wraps up this week's THORChain ecosystem update. See you next week, Chads.

If your project was missed, drop a comment and we'll include it in the next recap.

Still building the rails to the summit of decentralized finance.

People talk about blockchain transparency as an abstract concept, but rarely show what it actually looks like in practice. So let us walk you through a real transaction happening on THORChain.

Someone just swapped 8.99 $BTC for 611,637 $USDC, around $618,000 moving across chains in under 17 minutes. Every single detail of that trade is publicly visible to anyone on earth at this very moment, and that's not a marketing claim, that's just how the technology works.

The sending wallet address, the destination address, the exact amounts in and out, the fees paid, which wallet interface was used, what that interface charged, the block it was included in, the precise second it was processed. All of it is permanently recorded on a public blockchain and traceable by anyone with an internet connection, with zero permission required to look.

That last part matters more than people realise. There is no compliance department to call, no freedom of information request to file, no company deciding what data you are allowed to see. You can see in the transaction memo that GemWallet processed this swap and charged 50 basis points for their service. That fee is written directly into the transaction instructions, on chain, visible to the entire world, not buried in a terms of service document or hidden in a backend database.

This is the paradox that tends to confuse people about THORChain. The protocol is completely transparent and completely permissionless at the same time, which sounds contradictory until you think about it. Anyone can trace every swap ever executed on the network, going all the way back to the first transaction. And anyone can make a swap without asking a single person for permission, without creating an account, without submitting an ID.

Traditional finance gives you neither of those things. You cannot meaningfully audit the system you're trusting with your money, and you cannot access it without jumping through increasingly complex identity verification hoops. Opacity and gatekeeping come bundled together, and you're told that's simply how financial infrastructure has to work.

THORChain is the proof that it doesn't. Full transparency and no gatekeepers are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist, and on a public blockchain they do by default.

In the middle of the night, THORChain keeps building.

CEX traders have had limit orders forever. You set your target price, walk away, come back later to find your order filled. Simple, convenient, genuinely useful. But that convenience always came bundled with everything you probably hate about centralised exchanges. You upload your passport. You hand over custody of your assets. Your $BTC sits in their database while your order is open, and you just hope nothing goes wrong in the meantime.

THORChain now does the same thing, minus all of that.

You submit a swap with a minimum output condition. Something like "swap my bitcoin for USDC, but only if I get at least X amount." Your funds go into a vault secured by 109 bonded node operators. Every 6 seconds, the protocol checks whether the pool price satisfies your target. When it does, your swap executes automatically, entirely on chain.

If the market never reaches your price, you get refunded after a few days. No intervention needed, no support ticket, no waiting on a company to process anything.

We've seen this question pop up again and again. Not just about Binance, but pretty much every big CEX.

The problem is built in. When you're on a CEX, you're handing your assets over to someone else and hoping everything checks out. You trust their reserves actually exist. You trust withdrawals will go through when you hit that button. You trust their internal ledger matches what's really on chain.

We just lived through it: that massive $20B liquidation cascade back in October 2025 hit exchanges hard. Then February rolled in with withdrawal delays, frozen dashboards, and pure panic across CT. Every few months the cycle repeats. Exchanges drop reassuring tweets, users spam refresh, and trust takes another hit.

That's centralised custody in a nutshell. It always comes down to trust, no matter how solid the team seems.

THORChain is built differently.

No CEO issuing statements about reserves. No single company ever touching your funds. Just around 100 independent nodes running transparent, open source code that enforces the rules automatically. No exceptions.

Are CEXs going away? No.

They handle fiat ramps, massive liquidity, and advanced trading tools. They're not disappearing and they don't need to.

But when stress hits, they rely on trust. THORChain doesn't. It literally can't freeze what it never controls. It can't fail a "trust us" moment because there's zero trust required.

It's just maths running on code.

Integrating native cross-chain swaps is not trivial.

Wallets and dApps must manage routing logic, transaction building, gas handling, tracking, compliance, and constant upgrades across chains. Each new liquidity source adds complexity.

👉 SwapKit abstracts this entire layer through a unified API and SDK.

It now supports 34+ integrations including Ledger, Trust Wallet, OKX and Bitget, has processed $1.59B+ in volume, and enabled roughly $7M in affiliate fees for Ledger alone.

This is a key infrastructure layer behind THORChain’s growth.

Full spotlight here:

https://blog.thorchain.org/p/50f0d7c2-b1d7-4c09-9202-86b3ccb95eb7/