It is entirely possible to interact in every way with Thorchain (swap, add to pools etc.) without ever touching or holding RUNE in your wallet. Asymmetric pooling is available (and my preferred strategy personally) and fees are payed in whatever coins you use. You can also withdraw from pools asymmetric. Behind the scenes, when you pool asymmetric, it auto swaps half your addition into RUNE, so you do have RUNE price exposure, but they also have Impermanent Loss protection, another key feature.
Thorchain has very little governance built in, by design, so you can't really consider RUNE as a governance token.
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