New Discord Announcement from THORChain Devs #🚨thornode-mainnet

# 📢 Dynamic Fee Experiment Update & Expansion

I know we've had several announcements like this recently. We don't want to create churn for the community or node operators, but there has been a lot happening lately—which is both exciting and, at times, operationally challenging.

I wanted to provide a quick update on the Symbiosis experiment and announce that we're expanding the dynamic fee experiment to another affiliate: **ShapeShift** (`ss`).

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## Symbiosis Update

We ran into an immediate issue with the Symbiosis rollout. Because we were receiving essentially **zero trading volume**, the dynamic fee mechanism never had an opportunity to "spin up."

This is a relatively small edge-case bug. Under normal conditions it isn't an issue, since it only takes a single swap for a given trading pair to initialize the feature. However, Symbiosis wasn't sending any swaps our way. We generally win larger trades ($50k–$100k+), which occur less frequently, so this left the experiment with no meaningful data.

While investigating, I also noticed an inefficiency in how Symbiosis routes swaps through THORChain that inflates our quoted price.

For example, for an **ETH → BTC** swap, Symbiosis currently:
1. Swaps **ETH → USDC** through Kyber or 0x.
2. Sends the resulting **USDC** to THORChain.
3. THORChain then swaps **USDC → BTC**.

This results in an unnecessary extra swap before reaching THORChain.

A more efficient flow would be to send **ETH directly** to THORChain and allow THORChain to perform the native double swap internally. This reduces unnecessary overhead and produces a more competitive quote.

This isn't an issue for Chainflip since **USDC is their base asset**, meaning they only perform a single swap.

I've opened a pull request in the Symbiosis codebase to address this. There's no ETA yet on when it will be reviewed, merged, or deployed.

In the meantime, it makes sense to continue the experiment with another affiliate that has meaningful flow.

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## ShapeShift

ShapeShift has consistently been a strong partner for THORChain. Their team is responsive, cooperative, and easy to work with.

During **June**, THORChain captured **5.8%** of ShapeShift's routing volume, compared to:

- **Chainflip:** 54%
- **NEAR:** 33.4%

There is clearly meaningful volume available for THORChain to compete for here.

I'd like to ask **three node operators** to enable ShapeShift for this experiment using the following operational Mimir:

```text
DYNAMICFEE-WHITELIST-SS = 1
```

Since this is an operational Mimir, we only need **three nodes** to enable it.

Once enabled, we'll begin collecting data and evaluate how the dynamic fee performs within this specific routing market.