August delivered one of the best months for Chainflip all year, with swapping back up in full force. Here is how the whole thing went, starting with some numbers to highlight the month.
The numbers first
Just under $439 million moved across the network in August, up more than a third on July. Over 12,000 people used Chainflip routing to move it, about 2,400 more than we had the month before. Between them they paid $1.12 million in fees, shared out between our brokers and the network.
The user count is the one we keep coming back to. It grew faster than volume did, while the average swap size barely moved and stayed around $13,300. That tells you this was not a handful of swappers swapping more, it was more people finding us in more places, and new users coming to swap with us.
Of that $1.12M, $851K went out to the brokers who integrated us and to everyone supplying Boost liquidity, either through lending or through our Boost pools. The other $274K stayed with the protocol and got burned.
Bitcoin is our bread and butter
Take the Chainflip branding away and the one thing swappers keep coming back to us for is Bitcoin swaps. It is something we do extremely well, and we are the industry leaders in it. It is also what Chainflip was built around in the first place. So it is no surprise that $125 million of flow started in BTC over the last 30 days, near enough half of everything we settled. That flow goes into Bitcoin and back out of it in real size.
There are two things in there worth pulling out. The first is one we are quite proud of, which is that TRON has landed properly. It is now the best chain launch we have done. USDT on TRON pulled in $23.2 million of destination flow in only its third month, and it started fast. The first 30 days did $25.63M across 956 swaps, past both the $8M we set as a base and the $20M we set as a stretch. Solana's first month, for comparison, was $8.23M across 1,651 swaps. That is three times the money on 40% fewer transactions, and 77% of it came through DCA.
The other one is ETH to SOL, which did $15.9 million both ways without Bitcoin being involved anywhere in it. Bitcoin is still the favourite for Chainflip swappers, but that is what growing past it looks like, with more native routes carrying real size.
Most of you did not even know you swapped with us
Our own front end had a strong month. But most of the traffic came from people who have never once opened swap.chainflip.io, and that is all down to our integrations. In August that meant $25.8M through MetaMask, $17.9M through THORSwap and $8.6M through Trust Wallet. None of them needed the person doing the swap to know our name for it to work.
Five things landed or were announced during the month:
We announced USDT-TRC20 for Chainflip Lending on 25 August, and it goes live this week. It is the first TRON asset we have put into the lending market. You will be able to put up native BTC as collateral, borrow real TRC20 dollars against it, and have them land on TRON with no bridge and nothing wrapped in the middle. That matters because TRON holds about 47% of all the USDT there is, north of $90 billion, and hardly any of it earns a thing. The whole of TRON DeFi is only around $5B, with more than 90% of that sitting inside JustLend. There have always been very few places for that money to go, and now there is one more.
Ravn shipped an MCP interface on 20 August, which means AI agents can route native Bitcoin through us now. It is a small thing today, but it may well not be in a year or two.
Token Terminal started tracking us on 18 August, which is one of our favourite things to come out of the month. Our fees, revenue and volume now sit next to every other chain and app they cover, measured the same way.
BNB Chain is coming, which we confirmed on 30 August along with USDT on BNB. It is a big value unlock for us, and it keeps up the trend of more frequent chain launches we have had running all year. BNB hits testnet this week, so activation is not far behind.
Wormhole Portal ran its first full month routing through us via SwapKit. That adds one of the OG bridge interfaces to the Bitcoin network.
There is one more we could not skip past, which is that the first giga swap landed. It is the biggest single swap we have ever settled, and it came at the end of a week that did $104.4 million across 8,387 swaps.
Incident report on August 24
On a Sunday late in the month we spotted someone trying to exploit our cross chain messaging and refund logic on Ethereum. We paused deposits and quoting on Ethereum, Arbitrum and TRON while we looked into it. The fix went out as a network upgrade inside about 24 hours. After that the chains came back on, and anything caught in the window was processed or refunded on its own.
No user funds were lost.
We picked it up quickly and worked through it with one aim in mind. That was getting every service back up and running smoothly for the people relying on them.
Fewer FLIP, every single month
We burned 707,334 FLIP in August, against 334,000 paid out in validator emissions. That leaves 373,000 fewer FLIP than there were when the month started. Burns have been running at more than double emissions for three months now. Total supply is down to just over 89 million, below the 90 million we launched the network with three years ago.
At the same time, people are locking up more of what is left. 34.2% of circulating supply, about 30.2 million FLIP, is now sitting in the staking contract. The minimum bond to hold one of the 150 authority seats went from 58,945 FLIP at epoch 455 to 196,984 by epoch 463, more than tripling inside five weeks.
So where is FLIP 2.1?
Today we earn fees, use them to buy FLIP on Chainflip itself, and then burn it. With buy and burn, everyone holding FLIP gets the benefit of swap volume indirectly, while the people staking and adding to the network earn a fixed yield through emissions. That has worked well, and it is how total supply got below where we started. FLIP 2.1 moves us from buy and burn to buy and distribute, so the value accrual shifts to the people taking part in the network.
We announced it back in March, and it does three things. Emissions stop, so supply is fixed for good. The burn stops, so the FLIP we buy every day is no longer sent to the burn address. And that FLIP goes to validators and delegators instead, which means staking rewards come out of money the protocol has actually earned rather than out of new tokens. It also moves the reward away from everyone who simply holds FLIP, and towards the people actively taking part in the ecosystem and helping secure the protocol.
There is more to it than a protocol change as well. It comes with a rebuilt delegation page and operator page, which is the start of something we have wanted for a long time. That is one app for all of it, where you can provide liquidity, lend and delegate in the same place, without fiddly steps or a second wallet.
Where it stands
We set the rollout out in three phases. The first was scoping the whole thing out with the community's opinion, through our community proposals, and that has been done for a while now. Phase two is building the infrastructure behind it. That is where we have been through August, and it is now mostly finished, landing in our upcoming network upgrade in the coming weeks.
Phase three is flipping the switch to turn it on. We are lining that up with the new UI changes, so the new economics and the app you use to get at them arrive together.
What it would pay
On what the protocol is earning right now, 2.1 would pay somewhere around 25% APR at today's 34% staked. That drops to about 17% if half the supply were staked. Either way it is a seriously strong yield, and one of the highest going for a protocol as built out as ours. More to the point, it is tied straight to how well Chainflip does, so every swap that routes through us feeds it. That lines the incentives up with the people who secure the network, and with everyone actively looking to put their FLIP to work and earn a yield on it.
Lining the incentives up that way also makes the pull to grow swap volume and revenue a good deal stronger. That growth now feeds everyone taking part, rather than sitting in one place. It makes the chain and asset integrations we have coming, like BNB Chain and cbBTC, that much more important. And it keeps us looking hard at the other networks where the growth actually is.
One month down, many more to come
August was one month out of a lot, but every month still feels like an opportunity to grow even further. We are proud of what we got done, and looking forward to the rest of it. Thank you to everyone who has stuck around with us. Now back to work, we have some network upgrades to ship.
Resources
Swap - Start swapping native assets
Lending - Borrow against native Bitcoin
Blog - Product updates and announcements
Chainflip Scan - Track swaps and network activity
Website - Explore Chainflip
Earn with Chainflip:
Boost - Earn fees by providing single-sided liquidity with no IL risk
Stablecoin Strategies - Deposit stablecoins and earn optimized yields
Provide Liquidity - Supply assets to Chainflip's liquidity pools
Stake FLIP - Delegate FLIP and earn staking rewards
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