After the news just a few days ago that SushiSwap were planning to integrate with Thorchain, today that process has begun. After much impatient waiting, the ERC20 version of RUNE has been launched, and three initial pools on SushiSwap have been launched.
Here is the token page for ETH.RUNE and from there you can see that there is 3 pools:
In the few hours since launch, the token has been heavily bought up on SushiSwap, with $420,000 of volume and $660,000 in liquidity so far. The price at the time of writing this post is listed on Sushiswap as $2.35. This is a large premium over all other markets for RUNE, however the arbitragers have to wait.
The initial supply of ETH.RUNE has been funded from the teams treasury reserve. It was planned that the bridge for people to move their RUNE from BNB.RUNE to ETH.RUNE would be launched within 72 hours. However, the team are speading up this process due to the high demand and price behaviour, and now expect it to go live in 12 - 24 hours. Once this happens, anyone will be able to swap to ETH.RUNE, and trade or add liquidity on SushiSwap. The delay was deliberate, launching the pools in advance of the bridge was done to thwart potential scam setups and protect investors.
At the current price of $2.35, RUNE is trading at a 40% premium on Sushiswap compared to other markets. As soon as arbitrage becomes available, that price gap will rapidly close. Whether it will close closer to the new ATH, or closer to the other established markets remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, the traders on Sushi seem to love it, being prepared to pay a hefty premium at the moment. Seems irrational on the surface, however it may not be as dumb as it seems. Getting a hold of some, and getting it into the pools at this early stage may lead to large fee income, and could justify the higher short term price. Or it could just be FOMO.
I leave you with a couple of comments, from the Thorchain Telegram group, by Kai, a lead dev on the Thorchain project.
https://t.me/thorchain_org/185781
THORChain handles the short tail, sushiswap, justswap etc. will handle the long tail. Eg. you could send ETH.SUSHI to thorchain's contract, have it swapped via sushiswap to ETH.ETH; swapped via THORChain to TRX.TRX & justswap to TRX.USDJ.
The crazy part is a swap like this drives volume and economic activity on source, destination and thorchain + resultant arbitrage assuming pools on both ends.
https://t.me/thorchain_org/185818
- ERC20 RUNE Contract = Deployed
- Sushi pools = Live
- Eth Bridge contract = Deployed
- Trusted bridge backend service = Deployed
- Front End = Live
- Testing - In progress
- Bridge Launch - Pending
The first message in particular was a lightbulb moment for me. In my head up until now, I was unclear of the benefit of linking with other DeFi projects like SushiSwap, thinking them to be competition for the same funds. This makes it clear. Not every token will make it into a pool with RUNE, the economic model and competition for space makes that tough. By being the architecture linking chains, and then partnering or linking with DeFi projects on different chains, Thorchain becomes the backbone of cross chain decentralized exchange. There is no need for Thorchain to add every token, it can focus on building huge liquidity in the top tier of coins across all the major chains, and then link to projects on those chains to facilitate access to the many other tokens to be found.
Not financial advice.
Thanks for reading, have a great day.
JK.
