THORChain (RUNE) is Rallying, but can it Hit $50?

THORChain (RUNE) is rallying and has been for a few days now, drawing in investors and traders from all over the world. The coin is still far away from its all-time high of $21.26, which it hit back on May 19th of this year, and although some are wondering whether it can reach this former milestone — others are asking if it can go even further, and potentially hit $50 before the year ends?

What is THORChain about?

THORChain is a decentralized liquidity protocol, which essentially allows users to exchange digital currency assets across multiple networks without losing full custody of their assets along the way. In other words, it lets you simply swap one asset for another in a permissionless setting, which eliminates the need to rely on order books as liquidity sources.

The project uses its native cryptocurrency, the RUNE token, as its utility token, and owning RUNE also allows users to participate in making decisions regarding the project’s development and future.

THORChain’s ecosystem is quite unique, and it helps mitigate the issue of “impermanent losses” that liquidity providers can experience when contributing to liquidity pools.

RUNE Price performance?

RUNE token has seen launched over two years ago, in July 2019, but its price remained relatively dormant until a year later, starting to grow in July 2020. At first, its growth was fairly slow and steady, with the coin going from $0.5 in July 2020 to $1.16 on December 31st, of the same year.

In 2021, the project exploded, going from $1.16 to the mentioned ATH of $21.26 in only five months. Its price met a number of resistances along the way, including $4, $6, $10, $14, $16, and $18. But, it was the one at $20 that prevented it from going further, and even though the coin did hit $21.26, that was purely due to the strong momentum that it managed to secure in this rapid rise.

After hitting the milestone, Bitcoin price crashed, taking the rest of the market — including RUNE — with it. RUNE was already too weak to resist the crash as its price has been trying to resist a correction of its own, so when BTC went down, RUNE followed rapidly.

The coin crashed to $7, with this support initially holding it from going any deeper, even allowing it to recover to $14. However, this was only temporary, and the coin started fluctuating, going up and down for the next few months. While its fluctuations started becoming smaller, its price was still bearish, and it was heading deeper and deeper down, until finding its bottom at $4.

This was in late July, barely over 2 years after launch. Fortunately, however, RUNE started recovering after hitting bottom, and by the same time next month, it was already trying to breach its new biggest resistance level at $12.

This resistance held until yesterday, October 24th, 2021, when RUNE finally managed to breach it after growing by 18% in a single day, and by 64.9% over the last week.

Why did RUNE skyrocket?

From a fundamental point of view, THORChain’s year was not that great. It saw a series of protocol exploits, which led to $8 million being drained from its reserves. These attacks were what contributed to its price sinking so deeply after going so high up beforehand.

However, its devs did not give up. Instead, they started working on solutions, and last week, the protocol announced that it is ready to re-open its Ethereum pool, as well as other altcoins, and even BTC-based pools.

This announcement made its price skyrocket, with the main reasons behind RUNE building strength including the relaunch of the token’s trading capabilities on all five supported blockchains. In addition to that, of course, it is expected that the protocol itself will see the launch of multiple new projects on its own network.

The trading services have been reactivated on all supported blockchain networks on October 21st, which is around the same time when the project’s price exploded. The pools in question include Bitcoin, Litecoin, Binance Coin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash, all of which are now in the process of being reopened.

Furthermore, the data suggests that there is a massive pent up demand for trading on the protocol, which was demonstrated by a near-instant $2 million in trading volume for ERC-20 tokens in mere minutes following the re-opening of the pools.

In short, the traders were looking forward to this for a very long time, and now that it finally happened, they did not waste any time in going back to the project.

That is not all, however, as another major reason for the RUNE price to be so bullish is the upcoming launch of new projects on the THORChain network. The projects will also be listed on the Thorstarter (XRUNE) platform, which is a RUNE-based decentralized launchpad

Can RUNE hit $50?

The big question that everyone is asking now is how far can RUNE actually go? There are some speculations that the reopening of the pools and the project’s return, in general, will see its token’s price go back to its ATH, but also that it could continue pushing forward, as it likely would if its previous surge was not interrupted by the exploits and the price crash that affected the entire crypto industry.

The coin could, theoretically, go to $50, but it would require a hard pull in order for it to do it. Meanwhile, the market seems to be preparing for another rally, as was predicted by numerous experts all the way back in the early days of the year. Back then, some predicted that BTC will be hitting $90,000 by the end of the year, which might still happen. The coin reached a new ATH only days ago, and while it is currently at $61.9k after dropping from nearly $67k, its price did see a recovery after a brief crash this weekend.

If Bitcoin starts leading a new rally, RUNE will definitely be ready to follow at this point. To learn more about this project visit our investing in THORChain guide.