The retreat from September’s peak shrinks a source of income supporting liquidity providers and node operators. It follows a burst of trading that THORChain’s September network report linked to funds moving through the protocol after the Bitget exploit.
The Routing Surge Fades
THORChain said most of September’s volume increase came during Sept. 25–29, as funds linked to the Bitget exploit moved through the network. Its report said wallet numbers barely moved with the late-month volume, pointing to a few large flows rather than a wave of new users.
Blockchain data provider Bitquery’s transaction reconstruction provides a concrete example: it traced 93.22 million stolen XRP into bitcoin through THORChain as of Sept. 29. The routing prompted a dispute over blocking identified addresses; The Defiant previously reported that THORChain invoked its permissionless design after Bitget asked it to refuse service to those addresses.
The weekly fee totals cover the whole network, not just identified attacker wallets, and do not establish how much of the peak those wallets generated.
Trading volume has also recovered some ground. The Defiant’s analysis of Midgard’s swap history shows $313.3 million in volume for Oct. 5–11, still 78.4% below the $1.45 billion recorded in Sept. 25–Oct. 1.
The initial retreat was sharper: volume fell 87.1% to $186.5 million in Oct. 2–8. Its recorded swap count fell a smaller 26.9% from the prior week; that count measures swaps, not unique users.
Fees need not track transaction counts proportionately. THORChain’s fee documentation says liquidity fees scale with the liquidity a swap consumes relative to pool depth, while streaming swaps split large orders into smaller chunks.
Gross Fees Are Not $RUNE Holder Revenue
Midgard defines the measured fees as total liquidity fees converted to $RUNE. They are gross swap fees—not net protocol profit, revenue paid directly to $RUNE holders, or block rewards, which Midgard tracks separately. Converting them using Midgard’s daily-end $RUNE prices would produce dollar valuation estimates, not execution-time fee revenue.
THORChain’s tokenomics documentation describes several destinations for fee income: node operators and liquidity providers, development and marketing funds, TCY holders, protocol-owned liquidity and $RUNE burns. Bonding $RUNE to nodes is one route to participating in revenue distribution; simply holding the token is not equivalent to receiving the network’s gross fees.