THORChain Update

After a significant amount of time and effort, last week we were excited to share that the Haven developers had submitted a pull request to the THORChain team. This kicked off the integration process.

Haven’s Bifrost client (the bridge between the Haven and THORChain chains) is up and running on Haven’s dev local environment. 

The Haven developers have successfully completed test transactions, sending, receiving, swapping, and liquidity pooling Haven assets on THORChain.

The THORChain and Haven integration work has been the primary focus of the Haven developers since November 2021. 

What are the next steps?

Now the pull request has been submitted, THORChains devs/team will review and test the code and when they are satisfied, launch Haven on stagenet with live funds for additional assurance. If everything goes according to plan, Haven will then launch on MCCN (Multi Chain Chaos Net).

What will a Haven and THORChain partnership mean?

This integration could be one of the largest developments in private, decentralized finance since the Monero genesis block.

For the first time ever, people will be able to swap between any supported coin, and a private stable coin or asset, without KYC. This gives freedom to choose between stable and volatile assets without the usual restrictions associated with centralized exchanges and collateralized stablecoins.

The benefits for Haven can be further summarized:

• Provides a further incentive for holding xUSD/xAssets
• Provides instant access to xUSD/xAssets – for the first time
• Allows xUSD to fulfill its potential as a private and stable asset convertible with any other supported coin
• Provides highly liquid on and off-ramps for the Haven Protocol ecosystem

There are also Benefits to THORChain:

• Stablecoins have seen multi-billion dollar growth during this cycle. xUSD helps THORChain meet this huge demand, by giving users stability with the added benefit of privacy.
• The exchange is decentralized, non-custodial, and has no KYC, making it particularly attractive to privacy advocates.
• xUSD gives THORChain the ability to offer something that is both totally unique and that meets an essential need.

A Note on CryptoNote

Cryptonote is the protocol that Haven and Monero are based on. Integrating CryptoNote on THORChain has been more complex than ever imagined. Akil has put in hundreds of hours of work on this integration. After Haven 2.0 launched, there were over 400 new changes to THORNode that had to be incorporated into Haven’s design. 

Learning the updated THORChain system and integrating Monero-TSS (a module that’s like a combination of Monero multisig and Thor multisig) into Bifrost was particularly time-consuming.

This is leading-edge technology, the developers were breaking new ground with the integration and there were no templates from which relative comparisons could be made. This made planning and updates awkward.