I've been an avid investor in RUNE (Thorchain) for quite a while now. It's been a few years since @shanghaipreneur, @jk6276 and @nealmcspadden started talking about RUNE. A group of us here on LeoFinance started buying all the way back when it was around $0.25.
A lot has changed for Thorchain, LeoFinance and the broader Crypto industry since then. Belief in Thorchain seems to have waivered a bit. When you look at Twitter sentiments, you can get a feel for this. There were a few hacks and the price went down because bear market.
This has led a lot of surface-level retail investors to dump their RUNE and move on. Thinking that the project would never return to the glory it once had.
When you look at the fundamentals of Thorchain, a much different picture comes into focus. I find it incredibly interesting.
Trading Volume & Liquidity, The Lifeblood of RUNE
Thorchain is an exchange protocol. When examining the fundamentals of a project like this, you need to take a deep look at the exchange aspect of "the business".
Is liquidity growing? Is liquidity declining?
Is swap volume growing? Is swap volume declining?
There has been $1.7B traded on the Thorchain protocol across 2M total swaps since the beginning of 2023. This is incredible. I still remember when we were on Chaosnet and the dream of mainnet is what pushed many of us to buy RUNE and hodl.
There are millions of dollars being swapped on a daily basis. The average over the past week is around $7.5M per day.
Liquidity is sitting at $111M as of this writing. The peak Liquidity on Thorchain's Mainnet was $542 Million on April 6th, 2022. The price of $RUNE at the time was ~$10. The price as of this writing is 1/10th that.
Despite a 98% drop in the price of RUNE (along with similar drops in almost all Altcoins), TVL hasn't seen exactly as big of a hit. We've seen TVL stabilize above $100M.
Why is RUNE's Price Hurting so Badly?
There were 2 notable hacks of the Thorchain protocol. IIRC, all LPs were made whole by the protocol treasury but some damage was done to the reputation of Thorchain.
I like to remind people that there were several huge negative events in all major cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin had the MTGOX event. Ethereum had the DAO blow up and subsequent hard fork of the network.
Regardless, this hurts sentiment around providing liquidity to the network. People are afraid of rugs and getting their money hacked. Dealing with money is a hard business as people have a lot of emotions tied to it.
Coincide that with the general bear market. RUNE has been no stranger to the fate that almost all Altcoins shared throughout this bear market: a 90%+ drop in price is not uncommon.
The Real Question
As an investor, there is a major question lingering here: will RUNE ever recover from the fate it's seen these past several months?
The current price of RUNE is $1.09. The current marketcap is $329M. RUNE's all-time high was $20.87. We are currently sitting at the bottom of the bear market for RUNE (the lowest low of this bear was $1.01).
Despite some positive price action in the broader crypto market (Mainly, BTC and ETH), RUNE hasn't really enjoyed much appreciation at all. This is a similar story for some altcoins out there but not all of them.
The question remains: will it ever recover?
Warren Buffett famously said to buy when there is blood in the streets. RUNE has never been more bloody. As Bitcoin has gone up but RUNE remained stagnant, there is mounting negativity around the token.
That being said, the protocol's fundamentals still look solid. There has been $1.7B swapped since the beginning of this year. There is over $100M In TVL on the swap protocol.
Native token swaps are still a unique quality to Thorchain.
Single-asset staking went live and currently has over $26M saved in it by 4,382 unique wallets.
I have been slowly and steadily DCA'ing into RUNE at these low prices.
While I can't say that RUNE is a 100% guaranteed success in the future, I do believe that it's a highly asymmetric risk/reward trade right now. I believe in the tech that Thorchain is building. I love the community on Thorchain.
I also see that the fundamentals are still looking solid. They are not dropping off a cliff like the price is. There seems to be some disparity there.
I also see that collateralized lending is on the way. Along with more chain integrations like BSC.
The future is looking bright for Thorchain from a technical and fundamental side. The price of RUNE might look a little more grim, but that either means the project will fail or it will be a massive homerun success of a trade. Buying when there's blood in the streets means that you are going to have to take that risk of being wrong and weigh it against the upside of being right and potentially seeing RUNE return to it's ATH's of $20+.
I've had my head down building LeoFinance heavily these past few months and haven't been able to look around much at Thorchain and dive into the nitty gritty. I have been DCA'ing and keeping a loose eye on the developments and my sentiment hasn't changed much since I originally started buying around $0.25-$0.50 back in the early days of the project.
NFA, DYOR. All of that.
I'm sure I'll write a bit more about Thorchain in the coming weeks. A lot is about to change for the protocol and I'm excited about its future.
About LeoFinance
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It's amazing to see coins like RUNE being 98% underwater and complete garbage coins like PEPE making so much tides. That says a lot about the crypto market.
exactly, not sure if the crypto market will ever mature; might still take a couple of decades
As long as people are using it and the community remains strong = the project remains strong! Great post, thanks for this info!
From the chat I believe it will definitely go higher and for sure it will recover
@khaleelkazi brother I really respect your opinion but I personally think there are so many other cryptocurrencies which are better investment then Thorchain or Rune especially in top 100 cryptocurrencies in the world
I love the project since I learned about it, and been dca'ing too. Thanks for the great review!
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STOPHonestly, I don’t know much about Thorchain or RUNE but from what i read it seems like another VERY risk taking which isn’t for the feint of hearts. I hope RUNE will get back to its potential in the nearest future.
Thanks for sharing (now i got to know about Thorchain & RUNE)
I would use Thorchain. One problem with it is that the dev team has to approve new currency chains in order to add a new coin liquidity pool to it. These guys went with this crazy new Luna/Terra instead of something that had been running longer.
Perhaps an exchange that could flood into HBD would eventually break the peg. So perhaps it is for the best they haven't added Hive.
I'm still really bullish for Rune, it has to bounce back at some point!
I am also hold strong to my RUNE and believe it will come back. Swapping native tokens (BTC!) is a strong USP. With more and more CEX pivot to regulation, this could absorb a lot market from these entities. Time will tell - I can wait.
I have my bag of $RUNE ready!
Rune Rune Rune. A solid solution that works but isn’t gaining traction, isn’t that a reflection of crypto itself today? Reminds me of another gem, Hive. Yeah
Good article, but the point of Thorchain is that you can have a way trade from one asset to another without transferring it to some untrustworthy CEx that may not return the funds you send it.
exactly for that reason it should flourish over the next years since CEXs are all going to get KYCed
RUNE is interesting but possibly with services like Rubic and Multichain people feel like they can get a lot of the benefits they would have with Thorchain through other mechanisms.
Speaking of the bridging. I tried two small tests to take bHBD back to HBD through the bridge and it acted like it completed but the small tests didn't how up back in my Hive wallet. Are there any issues going on with the bridge right now?
I'd love to see $HIVE $LEO $CUB $POLYCUB trading on Thorchain. Patiently waiting - but wanna see it before next bull market :)
What is the worst that can happen from here as RUNE should bounce back to $10 or $15 quite easily. I hadn't paid much attention to the fact it had dropped so much and will be looking into it as I missed out the first time around. Maybe the price will still drop some more as everything seems to be going down another leg again so sub $1 would be a buy even if it goes lower.