What happened on Chainflip between July and September 2026, in the numbers and in the things we shipped.
Chainflip passed $9 billion in all-time swap volume on 19 September. Q3 volume came in at $1.30 billion, up 10% on Q2, with every month bigger than the one before it.
Fees hit a record $3.30 million, up 53% on the quarter. Protocol revenue grew 12% to $787,000, and 2.35 million FLIP were burnt, nearly double the same quarter last year.
More FLIP is staked, with more operators behind it. Delegated stake across the main operators grew from around 15 million to around 19 million FLIP over the quarter, and new operators joined the set. The network is being set up for FLIP 2.1.
Swaps got faster and busier. 108,000 swaps settled in Q3, 97% of them in under 30 seconds, and September was our busiest month of the year with 14,000 active users.
Lending kept growing. TVL went from $2.03 million to $4.28 million, and active loans passed $1 million in August. Still small next to swaps, but moving.
Product and ecosystem kept moving. BNB Chain went live on testnet, a new lending rate curve shipped, Tangem, Wormhole Portal and ShapeShift all integrated us, and Polkadot funded six more months of Asset Hub work.
The quarter, in short
Q3 was the quarter where everything seemed to come together. Swaps kept growing, more FLIP was staked behind the network, and fees flowed back into the burn.
The headline is $9 billion. That is the total value swapped through Chainflip since mainnet, and we crossed it on 19 September. By the end of the quarter it was $9.4 billion, and the pace is picking up. ($10 billion milestone party surely)
Underneath that, the numbers we care about most all moved the right way. Fees reached a record $3.30 million, up 53% on Q2. Revenue, which is the part of fees the protocol keeps after brokers and boost liquidity suppliers are paid, grew 12% to $787,000. And on the network side, delegated stake grew by around a fifth, and new operators joined, which is the groundwork for FLIP 2.1.
We also shipped a lot. BNB Chain is on testnet; lending got a new rate curve and proper history exports; there is now a public status page; and partners get automatic updates from a Telegram bot. More on all of that below.
Headline numbers
Swap volume: $1.30B in Q3, up from $1.18B in Q2 (+10%)
Swaps settled: 108,200, up from 92,300 (+17%)
Fees: $3.30M, up from $2.16M (+53%)
Protocol revenue: $787K, up from $701K (+12%)
FLIP burned: 2.35M, down from 3.17M (-26%)
Lending TVL (quarter end): $4.28M, up from $2.03M (+111%)
Active loans (quarter end): $1.29M, up from $781K (+65%)
Active users (last month of quarter): 14,100, up from 11,200 (+26%)
All-time swap volume: $9.4B, up from $8.1B
Sources: Token Terminal, burnonomics.com, scan.chainflip.io. Volume is counted per routing leg.
The shape of the quarter matters as much as the totals. July was quiet at $322 million. August picked up to $439 million. September was our biggest month of the year at $536 million, with 43,800 swaps and 14,000 active users. Fees followed the same curve, going from $838,000 in July to $1.34 million in September.
Fees, revenue and the burn
Fees grew much faster than volume this quarter. Volume was up 10%. Fees were up 53%. The gap comes from where the volume went: more of it arrived through integrators and brokers, more of it was large DCA orders, and lending added a fee stream that barely existed in Q2.
Bitcoin is still the engine. Swaps into and out of BTC made up around 42% of network fees in Q3, with USDT and USDC routes next, and ETH swaps having their strongest month of the year in September. Boost and lending make up the rest, and both are small next to swaps today.
On the burn, 2.35 million FLIP were removed from supply in Q3: 703,000 in July, 707,000 in August and 944,000 in September. That is nearly double the 1.21 million burnt in Q3 last year. Total supply ended the quarter at 88.4 million FLIP, down from 89.8 million at the start, and the all-time burn now stands above 14.6 million FLIP.
This is one of the last full quarters where the burn is the whole story for FLIP. FLIP 2.1 changes where those daily purchases go. More on that in the next section.
The network: more stake, more operators
This is the part of the quarter we are most pleased with, because it is the part that sets up everything coming next. Delegated stake across the main operators grew from around 15.4 million FLIP at the start of July to around 18.7 million by the end of September.
Just as important is who is doing the staking. Two new operators, Regulus and SweetWater, came into the set in July and had each attracted over a million FLIP in delegations by the end of the quarter. BCV Finance, which joined at the end of Q2, grew from a small start to over a million as well. The set is still led by Event Horizon, Imaginary and Nox, but it is less concentrated than it was three months ago. New operators showing up and finding delegators is one of the clearest signs we have that the ecosystem around the network is growing, not just the volume through it.
For anyone new to this: an operator runs one or more validators and takes delegations from FLIP holders. Delegators earn a share of the validator rewards, the operator takes a commission, and the network gets a bigger, more spread-out bond behind it. At the end of the quarter there were 150 validators in the active set, 22 operators with delegation state, and 279 open delegation positions.
All of this is groundwork for FLIP 2.1. We have written about it here and will go through the detail closer to launch, but the short version is that the protocol's daily FLIP purchase stops being burnt and goes to the people who stake and the operators they back. The history exports for validators, operators and delegators that shipped this quarter are part of getting ready for that, and so is the growing operator set. The more operators there are and the more FLIP delegated behind them, the better the new model works from day one.
Lending
Lending grew in Q3, and we want to be clear about the size of it. TVL went from $2.03 million at the end of June to $4.28 million at the end of September. Active loans crossed $1 million in August and finished the quarter at $1.29 million. Those are good numbers for a product in its first year, but they are growth off a small base, and lending fees are a tiny share of the whole picture today. We expect it to take a while to matter in the fee mix.
Most of the demand is for stablecoins. The USDT and USDC pools ran close to full for much of the quarter, which is why we shipped a new rate curve in Q3 (more on that below). BTC is the biggest pool by supply and the main collateral behind loans, which is exactly the use case we built this for: people who hold native BTC and want to borrow against it without wrapping it or moving it anywhere.
A few other things we are pleased with. Over the whole life of the product, more than $112 million has been borrowed and $111 million repaid. There have been zero losses to the pools. And liquidations, when they happen, have been soft ones, settled in small chunks on the Chainflip AMM rather than one big forced sale.
The biggest swaps of the quarter
We like sharing these because they show what the network can handle. Five swaps over $1.75 million settled in Q3, and three of them came through SwapKit.
$3.02M: 1,230 ETH to USDC (Sep 17)
$2.79M: 34.9 BTC to SOL (Aug 27)
$2.05M: 20,000 SOL to BTC via SwapKit (Sep 5)
$1.80M: 25 BTC to USDT via SwapKit (Aug 20)
$1.79M: USDT to 23 BTC via SwapKit (Aug 22)
We also saw the largest WBTC swap ever on Chainflip on 9 September: 8.78 WBTC swapped into 8.70 native BTC, worth about $690,000. It went through the Chainflip app as a 70-chunk DCA order and landed within 0.02% of the oracle price. Getting from wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum to real Bitcoin in one step, with no bridge, is still something only we do.
Product
A lot shipped in Q3. The short version:
BNB Chain on testnet. BNB and BSC USDT are live on Perseverance, our testnet, ahead of the mainnet launch. This is the first new chain since Tron, and it opens up one of the busiest retail ecosystems in crypto.
New lending rate curve. With the stablecoin pools running near full, the old curve was not doing enough to pull in supply. The new one raises rates faster as utilisation climbs, so lenders are paid properly when demand is high and borrowers still get a sensible rate when it is not.
Lending upgrades and history exports. Validators, operators and delegators can now export their full history, which makes tax time and bookkeeping a lot less painful.
Public status page: status.chainflip.io shows live network health, so you no longer have to ask in Discord whether something is up.
Telegram bot for partners. Integrators now get automatic updates on releases, incidents and changes straight into their own channels.
Ecosystem
The integrations this quarter were a mix of new front doors and new ways to use what we already have.
Token Terminal: Chainflip's fees, revenue, volume and lending data are now on Token Terminal, with the full methodology published. If you want to check anything in this report, that is where to look.
Tangem integrated us through SwapKit, so Tangem cardholders can swap native assets across chains from their hardware wallet.
Wormhole Portal integrated us through SwapKit as well and routed $1.13 million through Chainflip in its first weeks.
ShapeShift launched its widget with Chainflip routes.
LeoDex added Chainflip Lending, so you can now lend and borrow through their app as well as ours.
Ravn launched an MCP for native BTC swaps via Chainflip, which means AI agents can now swap real Bitcoin without a wrapped token in the middle.
The Polkadot Referendum 1913 passed, funding six more months of Asset Hub work. Thank you to everyone in the Polkadot community who voted.
Community Project page for all projects built with, and on top of, Chainflip by the community. Submit yours now!
Community
Three community projects we want to call out this quarter.
CrossEarn launched, a community-run FLIP staking vault built by CFG. It pools smaller holders together to delegate, and it is a good example of what the delegated staking system was meant to enable.
Burnonomics by Agent Chud shipped a big update. It now reads like a set of accounts for Chainflip: a quarterly income statement, fees broken down by asset, supply against issuance, and lending and staking dashboards, all independent and alive. Several of the numbers in this report come from it. If you want to understand Chainflip as a business, it is the best place to start.
Quick Swap, the browser extension from Petersmeds, got a big update. If you have not tried it, it puts a Chainflip swap one click away from any page.
We could not do this without the people who build around Chainflip. If you are working on something, tell us or submit your project on the new community projects page.
What is next
Q4 is about two things: getting BNB Chain to mainnet, and getting FLIP 2.1 and the new app into your hands.
BNB Chain mainnet is the next step after the testnet work this quarter. It brings BNB and BSC USDT to the swap app and to every integrator at the same time.
FLIP 2.1 is the bigger change, and the network is in a good place to receive it: more stake, more operators, and the tooling they need already shipping. Alongside the change to where the daily FLIP purchase goes, staking moves into the main Chainflip app under a new Earn section, and operators get their own app built for running a node business. We built too many front doors, and this is us fixing that. Full details and walkthroughs closer to launch.
Q3 grew volume, fees, lending and integrations
Q3 was a good quarter, and it was a good quarter for the right reasons. More volume, more fees, more lending, more integrations, all from real usage. We are not going to pretend every number went up (the burn was lower than Q2's May spike), but the direction is clear and the foundations are in a much better place than they were three months ago.
Thank you to the brokers, the Boost liquidity suppliers, the validators and operators, and everyone who integrated us this quarter. See you in Q4.
The Chainflip Labs Team
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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