THORChain Review: Why Should You Invest in RUNE and How Much Potential it Holds

With all of the hype surrounding the cryptocurrency industry, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that history is being written right now. Some of the coins and tokens experiencing record growth are those associated with crypto ventures that can potentially transform the financial system altogether.

One of these projects is ThorChain, and then it later released the first-ever decentralized exchange that allows users to trade native cryptocurrencies.

ThorChain’s RUNE became a coin on its blockchain, and it has continued to rise strongly despite the recent market downturn. We’ll explain what ThorChain is, how it functions, and why one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies currently accessible is RUNE.

In this review, we will explain why you should select ThorChain and will it turn out to be a good investment. So, keep reading the article as we are about to explore more about the DeFi Coin.

ThorChain and Previous History

ThorChain was created in 2018 at a Binance hackathon by a group of anonymous cryptocurrency developers.

There is no official creator for the project, and none of the 18 self-organized developers have any formal title. The ThorChain website was developed by its community. It would become a cause for concern when ThorChain’s core operations were not so transparent.

Code of ThorChain is fully open source, and it has been audited seven times by reputable auditing companies such as Certic and the Gauntlet. ThorChain has received more than two million dollars from the RUNE token’s private and seed sales, as well as a quarter-million dollars from its IEO on Binance.

ThorChain is a protocol that allows users to transfer cryptocurrencies between blockchains instantly. It’s intended to serve as the backend for the next wave of decentralized cross-chain exchanges. ThorChain Chaosnet went live back in 2020 after almost two years of development.

ThorChains Chaosnet was then used to power the BepSwap DEX, the first decentralized exchange to be launched on the Binance Smart Chain in September 2020.

BepSwap is a testbed for the multi-chain launch of ThorChain Chaosnet, which includes wrapped BEP2 versions of several digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin (LTC).

Chaosnet, a multi-chain cryptocurrency exchange, went live earlier this month. It allows users to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and a half-dozen other cryptocurrencies in their native forms without bundling them.

The ThorSwap interface, the Asgardex web interface, and the Asgardex desktop client, which serves as the front end for ThorChain’s multi-chain Chaosnet protocol, can all be used to accomplish this. ThorChain group is also developing several DEX interfaces based on the protocol.

What is ThorChain and How it Works?

ThorChain is developed with the Cosmos SDK and uses the Tendermint Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. Presently, the ThorChain blockchain has 76 validator nodes, with the capacity to serve up to 360 validator nodes in theory.

Each ThorChain node needs a minimum of 1 million RUNE, which equates to a whopping $14 million at the time of writing. ThorChain nodes are also supposed to remain anonymous, which is one reason why delegating RUNE is not permitted.

ThorChain validator nodes are in charge of witnessing transactions on other blockchains and sending and receiving Cryptocurrency from different wallets under their joint custody. ThorChain validator nodes keep rotating after every three days to improve protocol protection and make protocol updates easier.

Let’s assume you want to exchange BTC for ETH using ThorChain. You’d submit the BTC to a Bitcoin wallet address that ThorChain nodes are keeping in their custody.

They’d notice the transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain and send ETH from their Ethereum wallet to the address you have given. Two-thirds of all active validate and nodes must agree to send any cryptocurrency out of these so-called ThorChain vaults.

If validators attempt to steal from the cryptocurrency vaults they manage, they will face severe consequences. ThorChain nodes are paid to buy and stake RUNE, such that their stakes are always worth twice the total value logged in the protocol by liquidity providers.

In such a way, there’s slashing penalty is always more significant than the amount of Cryptocurrency that could be stolen from these vaults.

Mechanism of ThorChain AMM

Unlike other decentralized exchange protocols, other cryptocurrencies can be transacted against the RUNE coin.

Creating a pool for any possible cryptocurrency pair will be inefficient. According to the ThorChain website, ThorChain would only need 1,000 collections if it sponsored 1,000 chains.

A competitor will require 499,500 pools to compete. Because of the large number of pools, liquidity is diluted, resulting in a bad trading experience. It means that liquidity providers must withdraw equivalent quantities of RUNE and the other coins in the tank.

If you want to provide liquidity for the RUNE/BTC pair, You’ll have to put an equal amount of RUNE and BTC in the RUNE/BTC pool. If RUNE costs $100 and BTC costs $100,000, You would have to give each BTC 1,000 RUNE tokens.

Arbitrage traders are incentivized to ensure that the dollar value ratio of RUNE. Moreover, it ensures that cryptocurrency in the pool remains correct as much as in other AMM-style DEX protocols.

For instance, if the price of RUNE unexpectedly rises, the cost of BTC relative to RUNE in the RUNE/BTC pool will fall. When an arbitrage trader notices this difference, they will buy the cheap BTC from the pool and add RUNE, bringing the price of BTC back to where it should be concerning RUNE.

Because of this dependence on arbitrage traders, DEXs based on ThorChain do not need price oracles to work. Instead, the protocol compares the price of RUNE to the cost of other trading pairs in the protocol.

Liquidity providers have rewarded a portion of pre-mined block rewards in addition to trading fees, for the pairs which they provide liquidity to encourage them to incorporate Cryptocurrency ThorChain.

The Incentive Pendulum ensures that the two-to-one ratio of staked RUNE by validators to LPs is maintained, determining the block reward LPs receive. LPs will gain more block rewards if validators stake too much RUNE, and validators will earn fewer block rewards if validators stake too low RUNE.

If you don’t want to sell your cryptocurrency against RUNE, the front-end DEX interfaces aim to accomplish this. The interface allows direct trading between native BTC and native ETH. ThorChain validators are sending BTC to vault custody in the background.

ThorChain Network Fee

RUNE collects the Network Fee and sends it to the Protocol Reserve. The customer pays the Network Fee in the external asset if the transaction includes an investment that is not RUNE. The equivalent is then taken from the RUNE supply of that pool and added to the Protocol Reserve.

Moreover, you must pay a Slip-Based Fee, which is calculated based on how much you alter the price by disrupting the asset ratio in the pool. This dynamic slip fee is paid to the liquidity suppliers for the BTC/RUNE and ETH/RUNE pools, and it acts as a deterrent to whales attempting to manipulate rates.

We know this all sounds highly confusing. However, as compared to almost every other decentralized program, the front-end experience you get with a ThorChain DEX is unrivaled.

What is Asgardex?

Asgardex helps users to access their wallets and check the balance. Its online edition does not require the use of a browser wallet extension such as MetaMask.

Instead, press connects in the top right corner of the screen, and you’ll be producing to create the latest wallet. You’ll be allowed to create a new strong wall after clicking Create Keystore. After that, you’ll be given your seed phrase and you can download a Keystore file.

After you connect the wallet your job is done, and that’s all there is to it. Just to remind you, never tell your password to anyone.

In the top right-hand corner, where the linked wallet used to be, you’ll find a ThorChain address. By clicking, you’ll see wallet addresses that have been developed for you on all of the ThorChain-connected blockchains.

These are entirely in your possession and can be recovered using the seed. If you forget your seed phrase, scroll down to the bottom of your wallet list and press seed phrase; it will appear after you take up your password.

Binance, on the other hand, requires a minimum withdrawal of $50. Once you receive BEP2 RUNE, your ThorChain wallet should detect it automatically. You’ll be able to pick how much BEP2 RUNE you want to convert when you click on the notification.

It will automatically convert the BEP2 RUNE to native RUNE after you select next and upgrade RUNE. The process will only take about 30 seconds. Replace all of the BNB that Binance forces to withdraw with more RUNE. As you can see, the fees are meager. You’ll be given a time estimate before you confirm this swap.

The swap took about 5 seconds in this situation. Swapping against any cryptocurrency needs a minimum of 3 RUNE in your wallet, and the sum being switched must always be greater than 3 RUNE plus the swap charge.

What is RUNE Token?

In 2019, RUNE debuted as a BEP2 token. It had a maximum supply of 1 billion at first, but by the end of 2019, it had been reduced to 500 million.

RUNE now exists negatively on the ThorChain network, as we previously said, but there is still plenty of RUNE in circulation on the finance chain and even on Ethereum.

As per sources, a total supply of 30 million were sold to seed investors, 70 million in a private auction, and 20 million in the Binance IEO, with 17 million of those tokens being burned.

The team and their operations recieved 105 million RUNE, while the remaining 285 million block rewards and group benefits.

RUNE would have the greatest tokenomics on the market if it weren’t for the helpful team and private sale allocations. This is because ThorChain validators must be staking RUNE worth twice the total value locked by liquidity providers at any given time.

Since DEX users need RUNE to transact on ThorChain-based taxes, RUNE has a similar economic profile to ETH, which is used to pay Ethereum fees.

ThorChain’s demand is likely to continue to rise as it adds support for more blockchains and expands its ecosystem.

Since nodes automatically help chains with the highest RUNE liquidity pulled against their currency, they will require a considerable amount of RUNE to bootstrap these new chains to ThorChain. The ThorChain team is also working on a decentralized stable coin and a set of cross-chain DeFi protocols.

Image Credit: CoinMarketCap.com

If you’re looking for a price forecast we genuinely believe RUNE’s potential is limitless. However, there’s room for improvement before ThorChain can be considered complete.

Roadmap for ThorChain

ThorChain has a roadmap, but it isn’t particularly comprehensive. The only remaining achievement appears to be the launch of the ThorChain mainnet, which is expected to happen in Q3 this year.

Integration with the Cosmos IBC, support for privacy coin blockchains including Zcash (ZAC), Monera (XMR), and Haven (XHV). Support for smart contract chains including Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (DOT), Avalanche (AVAX), and Zilliqa (ZIL). And even support for duplicate chain transactions, including ETH and other ERC-20 tokens, are all concealed in ThorChain’s weekly notifications.

The ThorChain team is now planning to pass its protocol to RUNE holders in the long run. This will necessitate the destruction of several admin keys that govern protocol parameters, such as the RUNE stake minimum and the time between validator node rotations.

The ThorChain team aims to complete this by July 2022, which is a lofty target considering the project’s scope. This change in governance is also worrying, considering ThorChain’s history problem.

If nodes see some significant issues, the ThorChain protocol has a built-in backup plan that instructs them to leave the network.

When the number of active nodes plummets, all crypto kept in ThorChain vaults is automatically sent to its rightful owners, a process known as Ragnarok. Putting the jokes aside is a fundamental matter.

We observed that almost every weekly dev report includes a list of discovered and patched bugs. Although the ThorChain team will indeed be less involved in the procedure for more than a year, we wonder what could happen in the event of an actual emergency.

ThorChain is competing to become the tail for decentralized and even centralized cryptocurrency exchanges for the future. If ThorChain eventually accounts for a significant portion of all cryptocurrency trading volume, we are not sure how well it can hold up with so many moving pieces.

ThorChain’s treasury is well-funded to ensure the protocol’s long-term viability, and the project has good support from some of the industry’s biggest names. We suppose it was correct about Binance’s hidden weapon being ThorChain.

Final Thoughts

ThorChain’s final form would most likely rival centralized exchanges, making large-scale cryptocurrency trading challenging to avoid for any person or organization. The ThorChain team’s relative anonymity seems to have harmed the project’s visibility.

When you’re designing something like this, keeping a low profile is a good idea. However, the anonymity strategy has had some unintended effects.

ThorChain’s website is difficult to drive. Also, its documents and the ThorChain community provide some of the most relevant updates and details about the project.

One of the essential achievements in Cryptocurrency is the advent of ThorChain’s cross-chain Chaosnet. It is now attainable to trade native cryptocurrencies cross-chain in an unworthy manner in real-time.

But then, it is uncertain how significant players like Binance play a part in ThorChain’s operations. And if this protocol is going to be the back end for potential crypto trading, this is something that needs to be understood.

ThorChain’s Chaosnet is a newer addition to the crypto space, so it hasn’t yet seen the full range of uncertainty that the crypto market has to give. It has already encountered several troubling problems, which will only increase as more blockchains are integrated into the protocol.

The architecture of ThorChain is exceptionally well-thought-out performance is simply outstanding. We believe that RUNE will make its place in the top 5 DeFi Coin if it keeps showing impressive performances. The RUNE has really changed the game as it has no withdrawal delaying, restricts thrid parties from intervening.

Join our FREE Telegram Group Now!