THORChain (RUNE)

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Historical price evolution of THORChain

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

THORChain (RUNE) was born in 2018 during the Binance Dexathon hackathon, when a group of anonymous developers inspired by Norse mythology conceptualised the project. The name was proposed by JP Thorbjornsen, who for years would develop the protocol under the feminine pseudonym "Leena" to maintain his anonymity. Chad Barraford, a former web2 developer who had discovered Ethereum in 2017 during a trip across Europe, was recruited as CTO. The original version of the protocol was discarded due to technical limitations.

In 2019, the emergence of the GG18 Threshold Signature Scheme and the maturation of the Cosmos SDK ecosystem allowed the team to rebuild THORChain from scratch. In July 2019, the Initial DEX Offering (IDO) raised 1.5 million USD. As the first functional product, BEPSwap was launched, a DEX for Binance Chain assets.

13th April 2021 marked a milestone with the launch of the Multichain Chaosnet (MCCN), the first production version that enabled native swaps between Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash without wrapped assets. Erik Voorhees, founder of ShapeShift, became a public advocate for the protocol. In May of that year, RUNE reached its all-time high of 20.87 USD. However, the protocol faced serious security challenges: in July 2021, an attacker exploited a bug in the Bifröst protocol extracting approximately 4,000 ETH (around 8 million USD), which led to pausing the protocol whilst the team reimbursed those affected and implemented improvements. In September a second hack occurred with the extraction of another 8 million USD in assets.

On 23rd June 2022 the official mainnet was launched after four years of development, at which point the team announced its progressive dissolution transferring control to RUNE holders according to the original plan. On 28th July ATOM (Cosmos Hub) was integrated. On 15th November 2022 the Savers Vaults were launched, which offer unilateral liquidity for BTC, ETH and other layer 1 assets with yield in the native currency. In December, THORChain integrated with Trust Wallet, which has more than 10 million active users.

In March 2023, monthly swap volume exceeded 11,000 million USD for the first time. One year later, in March 2024, JP Thorbjornsen publicly revealed his identity as the principal founder, ending six years of anonymity under the pseudonym "Leena". However, the protocol faced its greatest crisis on 24th January 2025, when community analysts alerted about an insolvency of approximately 200 million USD: the protocol could not cover 97 million in BTC/ETH loans and 102 million in Savers and synthetics with only 107 million USD in available liquidity. The validator nodes voted to pause Lending and Savers withdrawals for 90 days, triggering a 30% drop in RUNE to approximately 2 USD in 24 hours.

In February 2025, the community approved "Proposal 6", converting approximately 200 million USD of bad debt into equity tokens called THORChain Yield (TCY), issued at a rate of 1 TCY per dollar of debt. TCY holders will receive 10% of protocol revenue in perpetuity. The nodes voted to reduce block rewards from 25,000 RUNE/day to 2 RUNE/day, virtually eliminating inflation, whilst RUNE fell 80% from its 2024 levels. In April 2026, THORSwap, THORChain's main interface, announced a bug bounty programme of over 1 million USD on founder JP Thor's wallet, whilst the protocol's TVL stabilised around cross-chain native swaps, its primary function.

THORChain functions as a layer 1 blockchain built with Cosmos SDK and Tendermint consensus, designed specifically to enable direct swaps between assets from different blockchains without resorting to wrapped tokens or centralised bridges. Its architecture is based on Continuous Liquidity Pools (CLP), where each supported asset (BTC, ETH, BNB, DOGE, LTC, ATOM, AVAX, amongst others) maintains its own liquidity pool paired exclusively with RUNE, the protocol's native token. When a user wishes to swap BTC for ETH, the operation is executed in two sequential steps: first BTC is converted to RUNE in the BTC/RUNE pool, and then RUNE is converted to ETH in the ETH/RUNE pool, establishing RUNE as the universal settlement asset that connects all blockchain ecosystems.

The custody of external assets is managed through Threshold Signature Schemes (TSS), a system where the private keys that control the deposits on each external blockchain are fragmented amongst multiple THORChain validator nodes, preventing any individual node from being able to move funds unilaterally. To operate as a validator, nodes must lock a minimum of 1 million RUNE as collateral, and face slashing of their stake in case of malicious behaviour or operational errors. Liquidity providers deposit asset pairs in the pools and receive swap fees proportional to their participation and the volume generated, whilst the protocol's governance is executed through on-chain votes by validator nodes.

Since February 2025, THORChain has implemented significant changes to its tokenomics: RUNE emissions were drastically reduced to 2 RUNE per day and the burning of 5% of protocol revenues was established, introducing deflationary pressure to the supply. Concurrently, THORFi services (lending and savings) were withdrawn following the insolvency crisis that occurred in January 2025, limiting the protocol to its primary function of decentralised cross-chain swaps.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.