Here’s why ThorChain’s 5-day volume hit the roof

• 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

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.

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.

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.