Where Your Coins Go in a Cross-Chain Swap

In a THORChain cross-chain swap, your coin leaves your wallet for a source-chain vault, its value trades through liquidity pools, and another vault pays the destination coin to you. The transfer involves an on-chain deposit, an internal exchange and a separate payout transaction.

THORChain’s documentation says its pools pair each supported asset with RUNE. For a fuller account of the route and its trade-offs, see thor swap.

Where does the input coin go?

The input goes to a vault address on its own blockchain, according to THORChain’s documentation. The network’s nodes observe the deposit and process it after the source chain confirms it; the coin does not move directly from your wallet to the destination wallet.

The vault is operated by the protocol’s node network. THORChain says threshold signatures allow nodes to control vault transactions collectively, rather than giving one node sole control of the funds.

How does the swap reach another blockchain?

THORChain routes the value through pools that pair assets with RUNE, its documentation says. In a BTC-to-ETH swap, for example, the protocol exchanges BTC for RUNE in one pool, then RUNE for ETH in another; the user does not have to hold RUNE.

Those pool trades are internal to the protocol. The route lets a user exchange supported native assets without receiving a wrapped version as the swap output, but available routes depend on the assets and pools the protocol supports.

What determines how much arrives?

The pool’s liquidity, the swap size, fees and the destination network’s transaction cost affect the amount paid out. THORChain’s documentation identifies price slippage and an outbound fee as swap costs; a larger trade relative to pool depth can mean more slippage.

• Check the quoted output after fees.
• Confirm the destination asset and address use the intended network.
• Allow for the source chain’s confirmation and a separate payout transaction.

Once processed, the network sends the destination asset from a vault on its own chain to the address supplied for the swap, THORChain’s documentation says. The practical check is the net amount and destination: the input transaction alone does not deliver coins to the other chain.