RUNE Token Soars as THORSwap Reactivates Ethereum Liquidity Pools

Fredrik Vold
Last updated: | 2 min read
Source: Adobe/gesrey

RUNE, the native token of the decentralized liquidity network THORChain, has soared higher in the market in recent days, fueled by a move to reactivate ethereum (ETH) pools on the protocol after an exploit earlier this year. 

The token, currently ranked 57th by market capitalization, is so far up 10% over the past 24 hours and 65% for the past 7 days, trading at USD 12.77 as of 09:15 UTC. The gains today made RUNE the second-best performer among the top 100 cryptoassets by market capitalization, behind only kadena (KDA) (ranked 102nd), which was up by 24% at the same time.

The rise today comes after what has been an exceptionally good past few days for the token, which has risen more than 71% from less than USD 7.50 since Wednesday last week. RUNE is still down by 38% from its all-time high of almost USD 21 (per Coingecko), reached in May this year.

1-year price chart of RUNE. Source: CoinGecko

Along with the rising token price has also been an all-time high in both trading volumes and liquidity on THORSwap, THORChain’s main decentralized exchange (DEX), the team behind the DEX said on Monday.

The recent surge in RUNE follows an exploit on the chain back in July this year that led to ETH 4,000 (worth USD 7.57m at the time) being drained from the protocol by a hacker. The incident led the team behind THORChain to halt the entire network, while promising to reimburse impacted users. 

On Thursday last week, THORSwap announced that it would reopen its liquidity pools on the Ethereum blockchain, which have been closed since the incident in July. The announcement followed an earlier reopening of liquidity pools for bitcoin (BTC), litecoin (LTC), binance coin (BNB), and bitcoin cash (BCH) on the DEX.

As seen from the all-time high in the usage of THORSwap over the past few days, the reopening of liquidity pools on THORSwap led to a surge in activity on THORChain, with about USD 2m worth of ERC-20 tokens changing hands in the first few minutes of trading, according to data from the DEX.

Meanwhile, the same DEX also said today that the launch of a new governance token for THORSwap is now just one week away. According to an earlier announcement from the team, the token, called THOR, will first launch on the Thorstarter launchpad on November 1, before it goes live on THORChain on November 3, and becomes available on the popular DEX SushiSwap on November 4.
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