- Most of the volume came from hackers who took advantage of ThorSwap to convert funds.
- The DEX has stopped all activities on its platform till further notice.
ThorChain’s [RUNE] transaction volume reached $355 million on 5 October. But that was not the only eye-catching event on the network despite the surge being a record high. In the last five days, the volume on the ThorChain network also surpassed $1 billion.
Realistic or not, here’s RUNE’ market cap in ETH terms
Exploits on the forefront
The surge, which was largely unexpected, did not just happen out of the blue. This was because there were obvious grounds for the hike.
But before going into all those details, information from ThorChain Explorer showed that the Swap History-Volume on the network had a lot of Ethereum [ETH] to Bitcoin [BTC] cross-chain transactions. This left the volume of BTC at $143 million and ETH at $75 million on the network.
Source: ThorChain Explorer
The reasons for the surge in transaction volume could be linked to the hike in exploits over the last few months. According to pseudonymous X (formerly Twitter) user banban, a lot of the volume was not legitimate.
Instead, hackers were taking advantage of the ThorSwap routers to convert stolen funds. For context, ThorSwap is the flagship interface for all ThorChain transactions. It also functions as a multichain DEX aggregator.
Banban also went ahead to mention that an additional 114 exploiter addresses linked to the FTX and CoinEx hack accounted for 95.7% of swaps on the network.
An additional 114 exploiter addresses linked to FTX, CoinEx, and various chain exploits have been included, as provided by @tayvano_.
Nonetheless, exploiter volume on @THORChain for the past 4 months accounts for only 4.3%.
The predominant 95.7% is from non-exploiter swaps. https://t.co/qEDnW1l658 pic.twitter.com/jWwze1WAUb
— banban (@banbannard) October 4, 2023
Four days ago, on-chain sleuth and smart money tracker Lookonchain reported that the FTX wallet drainer transferred ETH worth millions of dollars through 13 addresses.
So, the hike in ThorChains’ volume proved that the drainer was using the network to swap the coins into BTC.
FTX Accounts Drainer transferred 7,500 $ETH($12.62M) out again 1 hour ago.
The FTX Accounts Drainer has transferred 22,500 $ETH($38M) out in the past 2 days and currently has 163,235 $ETH($275M) left.https://t.co/YMSdqrSTxZ pic.twitter.com/dL6K47zC3n
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) October 1, 2023
RUNE falls and ThorSwap makes a statement
Meanwhile, RUNE seems to have been affected by these developments. At the time of writing, the token price was $1.95, a 4.44% decrease in the last 24 hours. The glaring red candles shown via Santiment’s chart below were proof of the rising bearish momentum.
Besides that, the daily trading volume of RUNE on exchanges jumped to $342.92 million. This metric is an indication of a rise in exchange activity. So, the high volume means that a lot of RUNE was most likely sent in a bid to sell.
Therefore, it is possible to see another plunge in the token value.
Source: Santiment
Following the events of the last few days, ThorSwap jumped into action by halting swaps, staking, and lending activities on the DEX. According to its announcement, it had gotten wind of the illegal activities on the platform which it clearly stated that it stood against.
How much are 1,10,100 RUNEs worth today?
At press time, the DEX, which allows for the swap of about 5,550 tokens did not, however give a timeframe for the resumption of the activities.
THORSwap is currently undergoing Maintenance. Swaps are paused.
LP actions, Earn (savers), Borrow (lending), Staking actions are all fully operational. Thank you for your patience and understanding. https://t.co/yoPlnE1AAu
— THORSwap ⚡ #BetterThanCEX (@THORSwap) October 6, 2023
