Introduction

Liquidity pools are used to be able to swap assets in a decentralized manner. There is always a 50/50 ratio in value between the two assets with liquidity pools. Users are able to provide liquidity by adding the two assets in the liquidity pool in this 50/50 ratio (symmetrically). On Thorchain, assets like BTC and ETH are paired up with the RUNE token in liquidity pools. Users are able to provide liquidity in three different ways (instead of only symmetrically):

• asset only (half of the provided asset is swapped to RUNE)

• RUNE only (half of the provided RUNE is swapped to the asset

• symmetrically

This dashboard aims to analyze the distribution between these three ways of adding liquidity to liquidity pools on Thorchain. We'll look at the current distribution, the distribution over time and the distribution by pool.

Methodology

1. collect liquidity providing transactions using the table thorchain.liquidity_actions
2. identify 'asset only' transaction using the filter rune_amount = 0
3. identify 'rune only' transactions using the filter asset_amount = 0
4. identify symmetric transactions using the filter asset_amount != 0 and rune_amount != 0

Results

We can see that out of all add-liquidity transactions, the majority (about 55%) is RUNE-only. Symmetric transactions account for around 25% of the transactions and about 19% are asset-only transactions.

Conclusion

• The majority of all liquidity transactions (about 55%) is RUNE-only. Symmetric transactions account for around 25% of the transactions and about 19% are asset-only transactions.
• Between January and March 2022, about 80% of all liquidity transactions were RUNE-only
• In the period where the number of total transactions increased, the percentage RUNE-only transactions decreased.
• In the largest pools, most of the liquidity transactions are RUNE-only.
• In smaller pools, this distribution is more even.

It is clear that there a period of about 3 months between January and March where about 80%(!) of all liquidity transactions were RUNE-only. However, at the end of March when the number of transactions started to increase due to the launch of Terra, the percentage RUNE-only transactions quickly dropped. In about a month (March 9th to April 3th), the percentage of RUNE-only transactions dropped from 83% to 11%. Since then, the percentage of RUNE-only transactions have started to rise again while the percentage of symmetric transactions has stayed roughly the same.

We can see that in the biggest pools, the majority of liquidity transactions were RUNE-only. In smaller pools, most of the transactions are symmetric or asset only.