RUNE Extends Rally After Interest-Free Loans, Synths Unveiled

Fredrik Vold
Last updated: | 3 min read
Source: AdobeStock / Dennis

 

The price of RUNE, the native token of the THORChain decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, has risen strongly for the past week after a slew of new features was unveiled, including synthetic assets and loans with no interest.

At 13:45 UTC, over the past 24 hours, the price of RUNE was up by 8.6% to a price of USD 7.6 Meanwhile, the price rise over the past week is substantially higher, with a 7-day gain of 78%, making it the week’s second-best performer among the top 100 cryptoassets by market capitalization.

Price of RUNE for the past 30 days:

Source: CoinGecko

The latest gains for RUNE followed the distribution of a draft document that supposedly outlines details about THORChain’s new features to “a small number of community members.” According to an update from the THORChain Twitter account on Tuesday, feedback is now being gathered, and a revised version of the document will be publicly distributed “soon.”

Meanwhile, the project’s Twitter account has also already shared some early feedback from members of the THORChain community. DeFi Watch‘s Chris Blec said that he reviewed the PDF and that he was “extremely skeptical at first.” But he added that as he learned and understood more, he realized “how gamechanging this can be.”

The new features that are supposedly described in the document are thought to include loans with a 0% interest that are available with a loan-to-value (LTV) of up to 100%, making them more or less unique in the ever-evolving world of DeFi.

“Sounds impossible? That’s the power of RUNE and a vertically integrated DeFi protocol,” the team wrote in a tweet from last week.

The new features to be rolled out are part of THORChain’s DeFi ecosystem, dubbed THORFi by the team.

Speaking in a Twitter Space last Friday, THORChain developer Chad Barraford indicated that the entire THORFi ecosystem, including a new TerraUSD (UST)-inspired stablecoin dubbed THOR.USD, could be ready for release on June 17 this year.

And while the full THORFi suite will only be available this summer, minting synthetic assets on the THORChain protocol was already enabled last week, the team said. It added that enabling synthetic assets is expected to bring cheaper swap fees and generate more income for liquidity providers.

According to Barraford, synthetic assets on THORChain are different from those on other protocols in that they are backed 50/50 by the asset itself and THORChain’s native RUNE tokens.

“Because the synth is half backed by RUNE, it can always ensure economic security of the synthetics, and that the network security is always greater than the value of the synthetics, even if they go 1000x up in value,” the developer explained on Twitter.

THORChain is a protocol built on Cosmos (ATOM) meant to allow crypto users to transfer tokens across different blockchain networks in a decentralized and non-custodial manner. The price of its native token RUNE experienced massive growth in the first half of 2021 but has since fallen, and it also remains down by about 63% from its all-time high reached in May last year.

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