A few weeks ago I decided to get into a crypto project called Thor Financial
Many HUGE changes were announced with the project due to their RAPID exponential growth.
With the crypto markets and stock market down, surprisingly a lot of these node projects have been doing well and it’s been a great way to earn passive income.
Now, I was in the StrongBlocks discord when I saw people talking about a new project called Thor that had an even faster return on investment and they were making about $2000 a month per node. I did my own research and decided to give Thor a try.
I started off by buying 2 Thor nodes and after a couple of weeks I’ve been looking to get into more. At this point I’m making about $180 a day and it seems to be going pretty well.
BUT Thor has made some changes to the rewards system that we will discuss here.
When I first came across Thor, I was excited by the huge returns but it made me think.. How long could this project really survive?
Obviously this is a riskier investment but with high risk comes high reward and it can definitely pay off. In my mind, whatever I’ve invested into these node projects is what I’m okay with losing.
But the real questions are..
Is Thor legit?
How much am I making?
Will these changes help them be sustainable?
What’s in store for their future?
So with a project like Thor, you buy a node and you get rewards each day for having that node.
The Thor project is on the AVAX network. The benefits of this is that it has lower transaction costs, high speed and Thor believes it’s more reliable for their needs.
With Thor, you can get into the project by buying into different tiers of nodes. So there’s Heimdall, Freya, Thor and Odin. The Odin is the highest tier and costs about 78 Thor which means you’re paying about $18,000 per Odin at the current price of Thor. Once you have an Odin, you would generate 2.73 Thor or about 3.5% per day and you could get your initial investment back in 29 days.
At least this was the case, but now with the changes, here’s what the rewards look like:
The cost of each tier has not changed, but looking back at our example of Odin the rewards have significantly been reduced. An Odin is set to generate 1.25 THOR rather than 2.73 or 1.6% daily ROI compared to 3.5%.
Looking at the other tiers, the current price of Thor is about $227. A Thor node would be $2800, a Freya would be $1400 and a Heimdall would be $280.
However, once you do get your initial return or what they call RoT or Return on Thor, your daily reward is reduced by 0.5%. It’s a one-time permanent decay.
Currently with Thor, once you do get your initial return, your daily reward would be reduced by 0.5%.
BUT with the changes, this reduction or decay will no longer be implemented. Rather the team is proposing a static claim tax across the board in addition to a monthly maintenance fee similar to what StrongBlock is doing. I’ll talk about this in more detail a little later.
If you claim before the Return on Thor period, there is a tax depending on the tier of your node. But if you wait until after the return period, you are only taxed 1% for all nodes.
But basically when it comes to these node projects, you have to create a strategy. You want to obviously compound your rewards so that you can earn more every month, which means that you would use the tokens generated by the node and create another node so that you can earn more. But at the same time you need to find a balance and figure out when you’re going to take rewards and cash out.
At some point, you want to at least take out your initial investment and let the rest ride. However, if you solely keep compounding and never take any rewards then what’s the point?
With StrongBlock to get in you need about $5000 dollars to get into one node but with Thor they have these different tiers.. Making the barrier to entry much lower.
So what’s my current strategy and how much can I potentially make?
I did have a strategy in mind, and I’ll show you what it would look like currently and after the changes that will be implemented.
So currently I have two Thors. My goal is to get an Odin which is the most expensive tier. It’s always a good strategy to compound your nodes as you earn rewards to exponentially increase your earnings. However, with this project you can’t compound across tiers. So if you only have a Thor node, you can’t save up a bunch of tokens and get an Odin node. UNLESS you activate something called “God mode” by owning at least one node of each tier. Once activated, you are able to compound across tiers.
Purchasing an Odin outright is difficult for most people. So another strategy would be to wait and make enough from the Thor or lower tiers, cash out and then buy an Odin.
Taking a look at this earnings calculator you can see that at the current price of Thor, with 2 Thor nodes I’m producing about $5000 CAD per month. The daily production of one Thor node is 0.33 so with two nodes it’s 0.66. To get to my 3rd node it would take 18.9 days which is pretty quick. Now, I can top off these nodes with my own money to speed up the process. So with 3 nodes it would only take 12.6 days until the next node and I’d be making $8000 per month. Obviously, if you put money in you want to recover your initial investment later on.
Right now, I don’t have God mode so I can’t compound across tiers. My strategy is to get to 8 Thor nodes and then wait for ODIN. Then it’s easier to get Freya and Heimdall and boom I’d have God Mode.
After that, you can see the compounding really starts to add up and by the second odin you could be making about $38K CAD or $30K USD.
BUT WITH THE CHANGES, HERE’S HOW MUCH I’LL BE MAKING – all of these numbers are before taxes and fees.
Taking a look at this earnings calculator you can see that at the current price of Thor, with 2 Thor nodes I’m producing about $2000 CAD per month. The daily production of one Thor node is 0.144 so with two nodes it’s 0.288. To get to my 3rd node it would take 43 days which is over 2x as long as with the old model. All in all I am earning less than half and it takes twice as long to compound.
These returns are just unfathomable and I hope the project is sustainable so we can see this through.
You can see that the original returns are unfathomable, and that’s why I think the team had to change the reward structure to focus on sustainability – especially with node creation almost doubling within just a week, the growth has been rapid so it’s inevitable that these changes would need to be made either now or later.
So is Thor legit?
After the rug pull by Ring, a lot of people felt that these node projects wouldn’t be sustainable because the rewards are so high and so we saw a lot of projects fall. Some people think Ring wasn’t really a rug pull but rather the team wasn’t able to recover after they project started falling apart.
So on the Thor chart you see the price was pretty high, then it takes a dip and then recovers.
And a lot of people were scared to get into Thor because it’s a Fork of Ring. If you don’t know what a Fork is, it’s basically when a crypto project (let’s take Ring for example) upgrades their blockchain protocol to a point where the newly created blocks are not compatible with the previous, already existing blocks. This causes a Fork in the blockchain, separating the newly upgraded blockchain from the outdated blockchain. Then later on, if someone wants to start a new project (let’s say Thor for example), they have the option of either creating blocks from scratch or taking over another project’s outdated blockchain left behind after a forking event. And so by choosing the latter option, Thor became a Fork of Ring.
So when the Thor project wasn’t doing too well, the Thor team really made a change and did something about it. And with such a strong community, Thor was able to pull it off.
So far with Thor, a major difference is that the team is super transparent. Not only that, but the community manager does a great job communicating on behalf of the devs, handling difficult situations and keeping the community engaged.
Even with the changes that were announced today, the price of Thor immediately fell from about $220 to $150. The community manager immediately ran an AMA and did a great job answering questions to a point where we saw the price go right back up to $200.
Another big thing is that Thor lead dev is KYC’d with Assure which is publicly posted. If you don’t already know you can go to assuredefi.io which is a company that verifies crypto project owners privately. You can go on the website and see a list of projects that are verified.
Also, in today’s AMA the community manager mentioned that they will be launching a union of transparency or UOT that would include legitimate protocols in the space. When this UoT is launched, the community manager plans to dox himself by revealing his full name and location.
With so much uncertainty in this space, I think these are some great first steps towards transparency.
Also, Thor has introduced RPC endp oints for each node. The main benefit of these RPC endpoints is that you can get cheaper gas and also transact faster on the AVAX blockchain
So is Thor sustainable?
Of course these projects are new so we never know for sure how sustainable the project will be. However, the team is working towards making the project sustainable and they’ve listed a few ways that they aim to do this:
In fact, all of the changes that they want to implement on Feb 6 are in hopes to make the project MORE sustainable.
Thor uses a concept called protocol own liquidity. Essentially, when you buy Thor a portion of the money is put into a treasury. The treasury is then used to earn more money by investing in other crypto projects.
The Thor team has said that when a node is made, 80% of the tokens will be sent to the rewards pool to replenish it. The pool consists of tokens from those who are not only new to the protocol but those who are compounding.
Right now, if you claim your Thor before the RoT period, you have to pay a tax ranging from 25% to 10% depending on the type of node you have. These taxed tokens are then sent to the treasury where they will be used to put in the reward pool.
The team will actually remove this ROT model and will instead lower the claim tax across all nodes. And there will be a node maintenance feed that will be paid in AVAX.
Some people are really unhappy with the claim tax and maintenance fee and they think its too high. The team thinks it will help the project become more sustainable but they’ve mentioned that they’re open to adjusting the proposed model based on community feedback. For example, Some suggestions have included removing the claim tax and only having a maintenance fee.
If you don’t pay the maintenance fee does that mean you lose all your nodes? Not really, so there is a 30 day grace period, if you don’t pay then the node doesn’t produce anything for another 30 days. If you still don’t pay then the node disappears. So technically, you have 60 days before you lose your node.
Aside from taxes and node creation, the team has also invested in other projects and will use the yield from these investments to replenish the rewards pool. They’ve invested in projects like Strongblock, TIME, Hector DAO, Anchor Protocol, Fantom, Luna, and Tomb. And what they’ll do is have the community vote help determine which investments Thor should invest in.
Lastly they also have two Fantom validator nodes and the revenue from these nodes will also be used for rewards. When it comes to having a FTM validator, the team is earning money by validating transactions on the Fantom blockchain. Not anyone can do this because a FTM validator is extremely expensive.
But the team says they aren’t stopping here, and they will continue to look for ways to sustain the Thor ecosystem and expand it. Their main goal is to move away from solely generating rewards through node creation and towards multiple streams of revenue to subsidize the reward pool.
As for the future of Thor
The team is planning Thor LP staking where you can earn up to 750% APR which of course will depend on the price of thor and other factors.
They also want to introduce a Thor lottery where you can buy lottery tickets to win nodes
They don’t have node fees yet like Strongblock but they are looking to implement this and change the tax structure. They would reduce the claim tax and introduce node fees which they say will reduce market pressure created by the claim tax.
They also want to introduce THOR marketplace where people can buy and sell old nodes.
They may even introduce a cap on nodes