Share this article

Thorchain's RUNE Token Tumbles After 2nd Exploit in 2 Weeks

The latest exploit cost the blockchain protocol $8 million.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 1:30 p.m. Published Jul 23, 2021, 4:35 p.m. 1 min read
jwp-player-placeholder

Thorchain's token, RUNE, tumbled in digital-asset markets after the blockchain suffered an exploit for the second time in two weeks, this one costing about $8 million.

The RUNE price was $3.58 as of press time, down 25% over the past 24 hours, in the worst performance among digital assets tracked by Messari with a market capitalization of at least $500 million. The token has lost some 80% since hitting an all-time high price in May..

Thorchain said late Thursday it was hit by an exploit, reported to have cost around $8 million. Last week, the protocol was drained of around 4,000 ether ($8.2 million) in another incident.

Thorchain, now with a market capitalization of $841 million, was founded in 2018 and is a decentralized liquidity protocol that allows for swapping native assets between different blockchains.

Regarding the latest incident, Thorchain told CoinDesk a hacker deployed a custom contract that tricked the network's Bifrost Protocol into receiving a deposit of fake assets. It then processed a refund of real assets to the hacker.

The RUNE token is still up by 178% year to date, handily outperforming the 11% return of bitcoin.

More For You

Bitcoin price chart on a screen (Behnam Norouzi/Unsplash)

NYDIG, meanwhile, rejected the basis-trade theory, citing the large discount and the lack of an unusual spike in corresponding CME bitcoin futures volume.

What to know:

  • A $1.26 billion block sale of BlackRock’s IBIT shares was likely a rapid exit by a large investor, not an arbitrage unwind, according to NYDIG.
  • The seller of the $1.26 billion IBIT block accepted a 2.3% discount ($29.5 million loss), signaling a priority on speed and certainty over maximizing price.