Cody McGrath 
Since the project announced the formal launch of its mainnet on June 22, the price of THORChain’s token RUNE has increased by 16%.
The mainnet launch was announced on Wednesday along with the introduction of a “Rune in a Million Campaign” on Binance, which offers users of the exchange a total of $1 million in RUNE awards.
RUNE’s price has increased by 16 percent after the announcement, to $2.18 at the time of writing, and by 31.6 percent over the preceding seven days. Even while the price is still down 31% from $3.21 at the beginning of June, the spike has given RUNE some much-needed relief.
Users can swap assets by using liquidity pools across a variety of networks, including Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Bitcoin, thanks to THORChain, a cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network. Additionally, the exchange facilitates the trade of synthetic assets (tokenized derivatives that mimic the value of other assets).
The project claims that it has handled native on-chain swaps worth more than $3.7 billion and that the total value locked is about $299.7 million (TVL).
“Mainnet marks the achievement of a fully functional, feature-rich protocol with a large ecosystem and strong community. It has been a long time coming and the community is very excited about this important milestone,” the team stated.
Notably, the assets will be supported by Binance, Crypto.com, Coinspot, Swyftx, and Ku Coin.
The project began in 2018 and is currently migrating from the “multichain chaosnet” beta version, which went online in April 2021. It has previously been the target of hackers worth millions of dollars.
According to the creators, during the past four years, it has also changed from a totally centralized project to one that is community-driven and whose “network is solely managed by 100 decentralized nodes.”
With the exception of fewer bugs and improved network stability/security, the launch of the mainnet won’t necessarily result in any fundamental changes to the protocol’s functionality. However, it will bring about significant changes to the project’s governance and adoption, indicating Thorchain’s maturation into a full-fledged network.
The team behind THORChain has previously voiced worries over the asset’s minting mechanisms and divided the asset’s trading markets. Prior to building its own blockchain, THORChain initially launched with two copies of its token on Binance Chain and Ethereum.
In order to phase in the new completely native and unified variation of the token, THORChain hopes to phase out these two RUNE variants over the course of the next six months as part of the mainnet launch. According to the company, more wallets will support the asset as a result of this.
This week, THORChain validators began voting to start the “death switch” for the IOU RUNE coin.
The team announced that it will continue to work on creating an Architecture Design Record (ADR) to document network modifications and the governance procedure. Additionally, additional wallet integrations, aggregator implementations, chain integrations, and a single-sided yield feature will be sought after. Another important objective is to further decentralize the government.
“Centralized points of failure must be removed as they are a risk to the future of the network. The largest remaining centralized point is Treasury management. Treasury plans to hand over full control to the community soon,” the team wrote.
The RUNE rally this week comes in the wake of the significant increase in native DeFi tokens from rival platforms like Synthetix, which has had its SNX spike by 75% in the last week to sit at $3.06.
The Synthetix Improvement Proposal 120, which went live last week and sped up trade on the platform, appears to have prompted a price rise.