The price of RUNE, the native token of the THORChain decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, has risen significantly in the last week following the announcement of a slew of new features, including synthetic assets and no-interest loans.
At 13:45 UTC, the price of RUNE had risen by 8.6 percent in the previous 24 hours to USD 7.6. Meanwhile, the price increase over the last week has been significantly higher, with a 7-day gain of 78%, making it the week’s second-best performer among the top 100 crypto assets by market capitalization.
The most recent gains for RUNE came as a result of the distribution of a draught document to “a small number of community members” that purportedly outlines details about THORChain’s new features. According to a Tuesday update from the THORChain Twitter account, feedback is now being gathered, and a revised version of the document will be made public “soon.”
The upcoming features are part of THORChain’s DeFi ecosystem, dubbed THORFi by the team.
THORChain developer Chad Barraford stated in a Twitter Space last Friday that the entire THORFi ecosystem, including a new TerraUSD (UST)-inspired stablecoin dubbed THOR.USD could be ready for release on June 17 this year.
While the full THORFi suite will not be available until this summer, the team said that minting synthetic assets on the THORChain protocol was already enabled last week. It went on to say that allowing synthetic assets will result in lower swap fees and more income for liquidity providers.
Synthetic assets on THORChain, according to Barraford, differ from those on other protocols in that they are backed 50/50 by the asset and THORChain’s native RUNE tokens.
“Because the synth is half-backed by RUNE, it can always ensure the economic security of the synthetics, and that network security is always greater than the value of the synthetics, even if they go 1000x higher in value,” the developer explained on Twitter.
THORChain is a protocol based on Cosmos (ATOM) that allows crypto users to transfer tokens between blockchain networks in a decentralized and non-custodial manner. The price of its native token RUNE rose dramatically in the first half of 2021 but has since fallen, and it is still down by approximately 63 percent from its all-time high reached in May of last year.