THORChain’s Mainnet Launch Spurred RUNE’s 20% Daily Rally

THORChain’s mainnet launch has opened the floodgates for bullish activity in its native token – RUNE. Over the past 24 hours, the asset rallied by over 20% to an intraday high of $2.3 amid a quick market-wide rebound. After a mild pullback, the token settled near $2.2 at the time of writing.

THORChain’s Mainnet is Here

The latest bout of surge comes after THORChain achieved mainnet status four years since its inception. The mainnet launch has been a long-anticipated one. THORChain was planning for it since late 2021, but several issues delayed the actual release. The decentralized liquidity protocol has mostly been a research project, but the achievement marks a key milestone signaling a new phase of development, scaling, and adoption.

The team behind THORChain announced,

“From its inception in 2018 until now, THORChain has primarily been a research project. Mainnet makes the change to a fully functional, feature-rich protocol with a large ecosystem and strong community.”

The main focus now will be on integrating with more decentralized exchanges (DEX) and exchange aggregators.

Meanwhile, to celebrate the mainnet launch, the THORChain team also announced the release of “RUNE in a Million Campaign” on Binance, which will last from June 23rd to July 7th, 2022. As part of this, THORchain has revealed committing a total of $1 million in RUNE tokens to all users of the crypto exchange. The announcement managed to catapult the price of RUNE to the aforementioned multi-day highs.

Cryptocurrency exchanges – Binance, CryptoCom, Coinspot, Swyftx, and KuCoin have all confirmed their support for the asset. Data on CoinGecko suggest that RUNE, however, is still around 90% down from its all-time high charted in May last year.

Exploring the Network

According to the THORChain dashboard, it has nearly $3.8 billion in native on-chain swaps. The previous network, dubbed ChaosNet, had witnessed some $9.2 billion traded over 3.4 million swaps from nearly 71,000 unique traders.

THORChain netted $80 million in fees from swaps. Currently, the total value locked (TVL) inside the protocol’s smart contracts was observed to be around $302.9 million.

The decentralized cross-chain exchange was hit by three sophisticated attacks in July 2021.