RUNE is the native token of Thorchain, a decentralized exchange network built on the Tendermint protocol.

Thorchain launched in July 2019. The token rose from 1 cent to 7 cents by the start of 2020, but its market capitalization rarely budged above $10 million. That changed by the start of 2021, when RUNE hit a price of $1.20 and a market cap of $205 million.

When the crypto market swelled early that year, it took RUNE holders along with it. In May 2021, RUNE reached an all-time high of $21.20 and a market cap of $4.89 billion. However, within five days, RUNE had fallen to a market cap of $1.89 billion and a price of $3.30.

The $3 billion drop in market cap didn’t shake investors, who in the autumn pushed the price back up to $16. The token fell once again in early 2022, but in April 2022 rose to highs of $12.40 and a market cap of $4.1 billion. That level was short-lived; a month later, RUNE had fallen back down to $6.

Thorchain minted 1 billion RUNE coins at launch. It held onto them, intending to distribute the coins over time. Investors received 70 million in a private presale, 100 million went to the team, 60 million to seed investors and 7 million to an initial DEX offering (IDO). Another 130 million was reserved to run the Thorchain company, and the remaining 500 million was reserved for network validation and liquidity rewards.

In August 2019, Thorchain announced Project Surtr, a token-burning initiative to destroy unused reserves over the following five years. The number of tokens that Thorchain burns each month changes in an attempt to reduce the volatility of the price of RUNE.

In October 2019, Thorchain announced that it would burn half of the initial maximum supply. This means that the allocations described above were also cut in half. While the total supply is fixed and the vesting schedules of some of the initial token distributions are predictable, the token burn and fees issued to validators vary over time.

Thorchain is a decentralized exchange based on the Cosmos ecosystem’s Tendermint protocol. However, the exchange remains in testnet. When RUNE first launched, it was issued as a BEP-2 token on the BNB Smart Chain, and later as an Ethereum token. When its mainnet launches sometime in 2022, these tokens will be deprecated.

Thorchain functions similarly to Uniswap, the most popular decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum. The major difference is RUNE can be swapped against any token; the protocol uses the coin to trade in and out of the liquidity pools provided by its users.

Thorchain’s IDO on Binance DEX only sold 7 million RUNE out of the 20 million offered. According to data from Messari, the IDO sold $224,000 worth of BNB, the seed round raised about $600,000 and the private sale raised about $1.61 million.

In July 2021, Thorchain was hacked three times within a month. The losses amounted to about $13 million. The largest hack exploited the protocol for $8 million by tricking the protocol into thinking it had deposited assets, then forcing it to issue a refund.

In March 2022, Thorchain integrated with Terra. Thorchain launched a public testnet in June 2020 and has not launched its mainnet.