After the mainnet went live, the price of THORChain tokens increased by 16%

Since the THORChain project announced the official launch of its mainnet on June 22, the price of its token RUNE has increased by 16%.

The team announced the mainnet launch on Wednesday, alongside the launch of the “Rune in Million Campaign” on Binance, offering users of the exchange a total of $1 million worth of RUNE in rewards.

The price of RUNE has subsequently increased by 16% to $2.18 at the time of writing. RUNE has gained 31.6% over the past seven days. Although the price of RUNE is still down 31% from the $3.21 in early June, this price surge has also solved some urgent problems for RUNE.

THORChain is a cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network that allows users to exchange assets across various networks such as Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Dogecoin and Bitcoin through liquidity pools. The exchange also supports the trading of synthetic assets (tokenized derivatives that mimic the value of other assets).

According to the project, it has processed more than $3.7 billion in native on-chain swaps and has a total value locked (TVL) of approximately $299.7 million.

The team said, “The mainnet marks the realization of a fully functional and feature-rich protocol with a large ecosystem and a strong community. It has been a long process and the community is very excited about this important milestone.”

In particular, Binance, Crypto.com, Coinspot, Swyftx, and Ku Coin have all indicated that they will support the asset.

Launched in 2018, THORChain is transitioning from its beta version (which went live in April 2021) dubbed "Multi-Chain Chaos Network," where hackers stole millions of dollars.

The team notes that over the past four years, it has transitioned from a fully centralized project to a community-driven project with a "network fully controlled by 100 decentralized nodes."

While the introduction of the mainnet won't necessarily bring about any fundamental changes to the way the protocol operates other than reducing bugs and increasing the stability/security of the network, it will have key implications for how the project is governed and adopted change, and marks Thorchain development as a fully fledged network.

THORChain initially launched two variants of the token on Binance Chain and Ethereum before launching its own blockchain, and the team has expressed concerns in the past about the minting functionality behind these two assets and the trading of the assets The market is divided.

As part of the mainnet launch, THORChain hopes to gradually shut down these two variants of RUNE over the next 6 months in order to promote a new fully native and unified token variant. This will also help more wallets back the asset, the team said.

THORChain validators began voting this week to activate the “kill switch” for IOU RUNE tokens.

The team said they will continue to develop an Architecture Design Record (ADR) to track network changes and governance processes. It will also seek to build new chain integrations, wallet integrations, aggregator implementations, and unilateral yield functionality. Further decentralization was also designated as a key goal.

“Centralized points of failure must be removed as they pose a risk to the future of the network. The largest central point is treasury management. The treasury plans to hand over control completely to the community soon,” the team wrote.

RUNE’s gains this week follow a surge in native DeFi tokens from competing platforms such as synthetic derivatives trading platform Synthetix, whose SNX has climbed 75% over the past seven days to sit near $3.06.

Last week, Synthetix Improvement Proposal 120, which increases the speed of transactions on the platform, went live, and the price seemed to spike as a result.