Simon Sez 🉐

Simon Sez

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@uselulo neutrl finance wasnt shown anywhere in your site. wouldnt have deposited if i knew you were putting money in there. how is this fair

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@Zdeadex @AvishaiY @CBarraford @THORChain the nodes can decide not to listen, and not halt. they still hold the final say/authority. maybe look into the ADR process on TC and you'll understand what i mean.

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@Zdeadex @AvishaiY @CBarraford @THORChain how is using a discord channel centralized? discord is just a tool used to communicate - between nodes, devs, community, contributors. the discord is also public, anyone can join including you. nodes could also make relay anonymously on-chain.

[Avishay Yanai @AvishaiY]

I think @CBarraford addressed your questions well. I know this is more of a policy and governance question, but as a security partner to @THORChain, we at Soda Labs can confirm two things: there is no centralized way to halt the system, and as of today there is no mechanism to ban addresses from swapping.

Nodes can pause the network: any single node can trigger a short global pause, and a few node votes can halt trading on a chain.
First, this is a very short time halt (1h) and can be overrun by other nodes. Second, network-wide emergency tools were built to protect the protocol, not to filter individual swaps or addresses. Otherwise it would be very easy to mount a DoS, which would impact many legitimate users.

And even if there were a way for nodes to ban specific addresses, it would rarely stop hacked funds from moving across these rails. Nodes would follow orders from their own jurisdictions, and those orders never come in real time.

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@laurashin @THORChain @CBarraford @tayvano_ @bitget 👇

[Chad Barraford @CBarraford]

"But I don't want to profit from North Korean laundering money via the service that I provide, that would be a concern for me."

@laurashin now that you know you do profit from "north korea" are you willing to send 1inch money back to bitget? Will you drop them as a sponsor?

[Chad Barraford @CBarraford]

"But I don't want to profit from North Korean laundering money via the service that I provide, that would be a concern for me."

@laurashin now that you know you do profit from "north korea" are you willing to send 1inch money back to bitget? Will you drop them as a sponsor?

[The Bondfather ⚒️⚡️🏦 @SirRawcha]

🚨 I'M GOING TO DEFEND @THORChain.

After watching the Bitget discourse, reading the forensic reports, and looking at what actually happened on-chain, the selective outrage is getting ridiculous.

You want to talk about “neutral infrastructure?”

Fine. Let's play fair. 🧵

[gabriel shapiro @lex_node]

. @CBarraford did amazing in the most hostile ambush ever and they couldn't even find a way to clip him to make him look bad despite doing the most; it actually won me over to the THORchain side of this "debate" whereas I was a bit skeptical before . . .

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@laurashin The fact that the hacker or whatever can go into the TC discord disproves your point about private discords and coercion. Anyone, including you @tayvano_ , can join the discord, can participate in community discussions, can even run a node, be a bonder, contribute

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@ilblackdragon @laurashin @CBarraford That's his point in the podcast. We could theoretically add it into the protocol, but nodes and community don't want it. Good that Near has it and it's aligned with your stakeholders, but it's not for Thorchain.

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@laurashin @CBarraford @tayvano_ Thorchain is public infra - a public bridge. Anyone can drive on it - criminals, politicians, whatever.

It doesn't censor. NOs are the local municipal who maintain the bridge. When a structural failure was detected, they temporarily closed the bridge to fix it.

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@hannaXbtc @laurashin 4 could also unhalt immediately.

[Rujira @RujiraNetwork]

We keep building, and soon you will have one place to explore all earning opportunities on Rujira 💜

Our new page will bring Lending, Staking and Automated Trading together.

After THORChain v3.21, this and other improvements are coming to make your Rujira experience better.

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@BooneW @THORChain @CBarraford @tayvano_ pls read. if you need more information, you're more than welcome to join the public community and public dev discord

[boone @BooneW]

Laura has platformed and propagated an impressive amount of misinformation about @THORChain recently, so allow me to set the record straight. To her credit though, Laura will be having TC co-founder @CBarraford on her show on Monday, to finally provide the other side to the story.

@tayvano_: “It’s not decentralized”

THORChain is very unique in all of crypto. It is no surprise that Taylor does not understand it, because while it superficially very much resembles other chains and protocols, it is not actually like any of them. Perhaps the easiest way to conceptualize and understand TC is to view it as a start up, ran by a DAO, that utilizes a blockchain, to offer permissionless native cross chain swaps.

TC is a Startup

The thing that TC is most is a cross chain decentralized exchange - a business. TC collects a fee for allowing users to permissionless trade a native, L1 token on one chain for a token on another. Businesses, as is hopefully obvious, cannot be immutable. They must be able to adapt to the market in order to remain competitive. Thus, the TC *protocol* is NOT immutable. It is governed by a DAO.

TC is a DAO

TC’s ultimate decision makers are its Node Operators, which control its Nodes. They vote onchain and thereby control the functioning of the protocol. Each Node gets one equal vote. They decide what version of the chain code to adopt, and thus also determine consensus.

A 2/3rds super majority of nodes can do essentially whatever they want. There are also several protocol processes that only require a simple majority to enact a change.

TC utilizes a blockchain

TC nodes run and validate the THORChain blockchain, which is a Cosmos tindermint chain. The TC blockchain IS immutable. Already we see how this can be tricky. The TC protocol is not immutable, but the TC blockchain is immutable - easy to confuse or conflate these two things.

TC offers permissionless native cross chain swaps

In addition to validating the TC blockchain, TC nodes also run full nodes for every chain that TC has integrated: $BTC, $ETH, bitcoin-cash:native, litecoin:native, $DOGE, BSC, $AVAX, $SOL, GAIA, TRON, $ZEC, BASE, and $XRP.
TC Nodes are split into groups of 16-20 called Asgard vaults, and each vault forms a giant multisig (TSS) wallet to custody exogenous assets - native tokens of each of those chains in the most trust-minimized way possible.
These exogenous assets are paired with TC’s native token $RUNE in k = xy swap pools to allow TC’s users to swap between real, native, L1 tokens.
TC’s guiding star is permissionless swaps. It is this criterion that shaped everything else about the protocol. TC believes that permissionless money needs a permissionless market.
Permissionless swaps are baked into TC’s very bones. There is nothing in the TC codebase that allows it to censor addresses or transactions. It is blind to the provenance of the funds that flow through it.

How decentralized is THORChain?

At the time of this writing, there are 103 active nodes (with another 15 eligible and waiting to join the active set). So 69 of them cooperating control the network.
However there are Node Operators (human individuals) who run more than one node (multi-node operators, MNOs) and thus have more than one vote in the TC DAO.
Due to the sybil problem, it is impossible to definitively determine how many people are required to meet that 69 node threshold. My honest guess is it’s somewhere around 20 currently.
Now 20 people might not sound like that many, but again, nothing in TC is as simple as it looks like from the outside. MNOs source bond from Bond Providers, and usually have a relationship with them. A BP’s influence upon a NO is roughly equivalent to the amount of RUNE bonded.
Thus, decision making is actually diffused throughout hundreds of BPs, and essentially all of them believe in permissionlessness.
NOs who vote against the will of their BPs will lose that bond, which dictates how many nodes they can run.
So in practice, it is the totality of RUNE holders that bond their RUNE (of which there are currently 736) that determine the choices of the protocol.
Understood this way, we can see that the TC DAO is actually very decentralized, and that it is the BPs, moreso than the NOs, that truly govern the network.
Additionally, TC is currently experiencing a NO explosion as numerous community members are being mentored and raised up by the experienced MNOs. MNOs are altruistically giving up their income and nodes so that TC may become more decentralized.

> "It's not secure"

TC, like many DeFi protocols, has suffered a few exploits and has lost money thereby. However users have always been made whole from these exploits, and no swapper has ever lost funds.

> "They've reallocated assets"

Taylor’s most correct and most damning allegation. TC created two poorly designed financial products, Savers and Lending (collectively known as ThorFi), that were essentially bad RUNE/BTC options and these blew up in early 2025. TC did end up confiscating user funds, but issued a preferred equity token to them with the aim of eventually making it back to them. There's no sugarcoating this, it is a huge black eye for TC.

> “Code not open source”

TC is open source, with the very minor exception that its TSS library (the source of its May 2026 hack) is temporarily closed source while its cryptographic security is reviewed and assured. The TSS library is expected to once again be published with the next release, 3.21.

> “It’s not permissionless”

TC swaps are permissionless. Protocol actions/choices are determined by consensus of the DAO, as has been discussed.

> “There’s an admin key”

There is not. It was deprecated in Jan 2025, right after it was used to set off the ThorFi collapse.

> “Stopped the chain”

Correct, the DAO stopped the chain to fix what was broken.

> “The actual people behind it is dwindling to nearly zero”

The exact opposite actually. As discussed above.

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@tayvano_ you're insufferable

[THORChain @THORChain]

The $ZEC pool is now live on THORChain.

The network churned and every node is watching the Zcash chain. @Zcash now has a truly permissionless venue.

Trading is the next step. Liquidity is shallow for now and will grow over time, so trade with caution in the early days.

[Rujira @RujiraNetwork]

Congrats, THORChain! Decentralized permissionless cross-chain swaps for $ZEC are live!

This also opens the door for ZEC on Rujira, where we plan to support it across trading, CCL, DCL, lending and borrowing.

DeFi for ZEC is coming to Rujira.

[Simon Sez 🉐 @simeling_]

@Airdrops_one @THORChain @near_intents fact check 1: THORChain halted to fix the issue that caused the drain, not to 'freeze' funds (it can't even do so at the protocol-level)

fact check 2: when THORChain was drained 10m, user funds were also reimbursed 1:1 using POL.

[Kenton Ralph Toews @KentonC137]

Laura Shin continues to deny anyone from the THORChain community to join her show.

Ironic, considering this is a debate about censorship.