THORChain Price (RUNE)

What Is THORChain (RUNE)?

THORChain is a decentralized liquidity protocol that allows users to easily exchange cryptocurrency assets across a range of networks including Bitcoin and Ethereum without losing full custody of their assets in the process. THORChain is used as cross-chain infrastructure for wallets, exchanges, and aggregators like Trust Wallet and Ledger Live.

With THORChain, users can simply swap one asset for another in a permissionless setting, without needing to rely on order books to source liquidity. Instead, market prices are maintained through the ratio of assets in a pool (see automated market maker.

The native utility token of the THORChain platform is RUNE. This is used as the base liquidity asset as part of THORChain’s exchange and is also used for platform governance and security as part of THORChain's Sybil resistance mechanisms — THORChain nodes commit RUNE to participate in its rotating consensus process, creating economic security for THORChain’s native asset vaults. The value of the bond is always greater than the liquidity on the network.

###When did THORChain launch?

THORChain was funded through an initial DEX offering (IDO) which launched through the Binance DEX in July 2019. Its single-chain chaosnet launched in April 2021, the multi-chain Chaosnet upgrade was launched in April 2021 and upgraded to Mainnet in June 2022. Learn more here

Who Are the Founders of THORChain?

According to an official representative of THORChain, the platform has no CEO, no founder and no directors. Instead, the further development of the protocol is organized via Gitlab with nodes as the ultimate deciders of which codebase to run.

Nine Realms, an organization formed from the community, now manages the codebase and coordinates software upgrades with the node community.

What Makes THORChain Unique?

THORChain enables native asset settlement, allowing users to swap Bitcoin, Ether, Stablecoins, and other coins across 9 distinct blockchains. THORChain acts as a decentralised cross-chain exchange, facilitating native asset settlement.

THORChain uses a unique slip-based fee system to help mitigate the issue of “impermanent losses” — or the often temporary losses that a liquidity provider can experience when contributing to liquidity pools. It achieves this by using a slip-based fee to help ensure liquidity stays where it is needed.

THORChain uses deterministic swap ordering to order its trades by the amount of liquidity fees paid. This approach eliminates frontrunning, sandwich attacks, and MEV strategies.

THORChain combines a range of novel technologies, including on-way state pegs, a state machine, the Bifröst Signer Module and a TSS protocol to seamlessly facilitate cross-chain token swaps permissionlessly. This is all kept behind the scenes, making the platform accessible to even inexperienced traders.

THORChain enables Streaming Swaps which allow large swaps to be broken up into many smaller swaps over time, which significantly reduces swap fees for users.

How Many THORChain (RUNE) Coins Are There in Circulation?

As of October 2024, there are 337 million RUNE in circulation out of a total maximum supply of 500 million.

THORChain initially launched following an IDO on the Binance DEX. As part of the IDO, 20 million RUNE were sold. Prior to this, a total of 130 million RUNE were sold in earlier funding rounds.

According to the official Binance DEX proposal, 10% of the total supply (50 million tokens) was allocated to the team, and locked until the launch of the mainnet — unlocking at 20% per month thereafter. Much of this allocation was on-sold to raise further funds for the protocol. The team own less than 1% of all RUNE. As of July 2023, all RUNE is 100% vested and unlocked.

ERC-20 and BEP-2 RUNE have been deprecated after a 2.5 year period to upgrade to native RUNE, coordinated by the validators. Only mainnet RUNE is accepted by the protocol.

How Is the THORChain Network Secured?

THORChain is built using the Cosmos SDK and is powered by the Tendermint consensus mechanism. This keeps the network safe from attacks through a novel BFT proof-of-stake (PoS) system that sees a large number of validators work together to propose and finalize blocks of transactions.

THORChain’s native asset vaults are secured by GG-20 Threshold Signatures. Every 3 days, all active validators are “churned”. Old validators are removed from the active set, as well as the lowest bonding and the worst performing. New validators join based on their bond amount. The new validator set uses Threshold Signatures to create new native asset vaults and all funds held by the network are migrated to new addresses.

Where Can You Buy THORChain (RUNE)?

RUNE is most liquid on the THORChain AMM which can be accessed by any ecosystem interface.

RUNE is a popular cryptocurrency that is available to purchase and trade on a large number of both centralized and decentralized exchange platforms. The most prominent of these are Binance (centralized) and THORChain interfaces found at THORSwap (decentralized).