Try Quests to earn cryptoOn January 7, 2022, Thorchain announced the doubling of RUNE rewards paid to its validator nodes.
Daily RUNE rewards to validators began doubling on January 8.
For the rest of this analysis, we will be looking at weekly cashflows.
What are Validators doing with their extra rewards?
In the last week of January 2022, validators collectively earned close to 185K Rune.
What did they do with their RUNE?
To my surprise, validators don't really swap their RUNE for other tokens.
The combined weekly outgoing transfers of validators can be quite substantial. However, to get a comprehensive cashflow analysis, we must also look at incoming transfers.
Weekly net transfers are very volatile. Some weeks see a net inflow of RUNE to validators while other see an outflow.
When looking at Thorchain, I like to focus on the post-relaunch data. This makes for charts that are easier to grasp. Even with these more recent data we see the same volatile and unpredictable flows.
Validators are rewarded with a combined amount of approximately 185,000.00 RUNE every week. Almost none of these RUNE are swapped by validators for other tokens. However, validators transfer substantial amounts of RUNE to other accounts. Weekly net transfers vary from week to week. The largest weekly net inflow was 506,537.00 RUNE. The largest weekly net outflow from validators was 355,531.00 RUNE.
How can we make sense of this? These patterns make sense when we look at validators as an operating business. The RUNE earnings produced by this business is transferred to it's owners accounts. It would be surprising to see a validator account being used to day trade by swapping tokens.
I expected to see mostly outflows of RUNE from the validators. I suppose that the inflows of RUNE are sent by addresses bonding RUNE with a validator.
At the beginning of this post, we learned that validator rewards doubled in early January. Based on our comprehensive cashflow analysis, we saw no clear impact of this emission curve change on outgoing transfer volumes, net transfer volumes, or on swap volumes of validators.