We welcomed to the stage Luc, a community contributor in THORChain and THORSwap projects. In a lightning talk he explained the key components of the THORChain ecosystem, its history and the core principles by which the protocol runs.

Luc’s presentation gave the audience a brief but complete walkthrough of the project. Next, a quick recap of the talk:

• THORChain is a decentralized liquidity network that facilitates cross-chain liquidity pools with no pegged or wrapped tokens. For anyone who does not know DEXs (Decentralized Exchanges), they make it possible to swap tokens within a blockchain. By using THORChain, users can swap tokens from one blockchain to another, e.g., BTC for ETH. 
• Swaps may occur as a Swap or Doubble-Swap. The first one exchanges any accepted cryptocurrency for Rune (BTC → RUNE), and the second one uses RUNE as a vehicle to arrive at any other crypto asset (BTC → RUNE → ETH).
• THORChain native token is paired with each of the accepted tokens in liquidity pools where any user can provide liquidity. Liquidity providers lock value and capture one third of block rewards plus swap fees. The other two thirds of the block rewards are received by the nodes.
• When depositing the tokens in the pool the user can choose to deposit 50%/50% of each asset or 100% of one of them: 50% RUNE/ 50% BTC, or 100% RUNE or 100%BTC. The symmetrical deposit is flexible and has no slippage fees, while the asymmetrical rebalances to a 50%/50% composition, has slippage fees and only lets the user withdraw 100% of the deposited asset.
• As a consequence of the protocol design, a deterministic pricing model considers the value of Rune at least 3 times the value of assets staked in its vaults. This is a consequence of nodes bonding ⅔ of Rune and liquidity pools bonding ⅓ of Rune, and taking into account that the pools constantly rebalance.