Over the past few weeks, I've been buying RUNE like there's no tomorrow. I started getting heavy handed in my buys when RUNE dipped down to $0.35 in late September.
Now, DeFi and the crypto market as a whole is experiencing another leg down. RUNE popped all the way back up to $0.60 for a little while and has since come back down to about $0.35. I actually sold some on the way up recently: once at around $0.50 an again at around $0.60.
About 2 days back, I started buying RUNE again on the dip. The more I dig into Rune and the Thorchain project, the more bullish I become. In this post, I'll talk about a few of the things I've been reading / watching from afar as I dig in to Thorchain.
Today I stumbled upon this video about RUNE which serves as a great elevator pitch for the project. It's a macro view on why Thorchain is important and what the overall mission is.
Decentralized, cross-chain liquidity.
Bitcoin Integration
Wrapped Bitcoin is an awesome invention and I'm all in favor of wrapped coins of various kinds (obviously). There are a lot of amazing use cases that have emerged out of wrapping coins - which, in simple terms just means that you're custodying an asset and then utilizing a disposable representation of it on another chain.
There are some obvious downsides to wrapped coins though. For Wrapped Bitcoin's case, you're relying on a group of custodians to manage the actual Bitcoin that is custodied. When you're using WBTC, you expose yourself to third-party risk that isn't there when using the native asset.
Thorchain is creating a multi-chain liquidity protocol. What this means is that you'll actually be able to pool (and swap) your Bitcoin - native BTC on the Bitcoin blockchain - with other assets on the Thorchain protocol.
A progress update was posted today about their ongoing developments to add BTC support (testnet next week?):
Earning With RUNE
@jk6276 wrote a great post earlier this week titled RUNE options: LP on BepSwap, stake on Runevault, trade or HODL?. In it, he breaks down the different ways that you can utilize/HODL your RUNE.
Later this week, I'm planning to make my first run at the BEPSwap platform. It's still in relatively early stages, but you can see the current returns on various pools. JK is in the RUNE-BNB pool and that's likely the first one I'll jump into as well.
I logged-in to BEPswap for the first time today from my Ledger and it worked like a charm. I may go ahead tomorrow and add some liquidity with all that RUNE I've got lying around now (maybe I'll do a video on it too).
ERC20s Soon?
We've already talked about this a few times here on LeoFinance. @jk6276 conversed with the Thorchain team on Twitter directly and asked them about the timeline for ERC20 support (they responded: likely by the end of 2020) and this prompted us to dream of the possibilities of adding WLEO - RUNE as an LP option.
I think this would be an interesting direction to take for WLEO's future. We've listed WLEO on Uniswap and have yet to integrate with other DeFi applications/liquidity protocols.
Needless to say, our target audience is crypto/DeFi people. We have a lot to gain simply by positioning ourselves to collaborate with projects like Thorchain and utilize their protocol.
When the ERC20 support goes live, I'll have plenty of RUNE to fund a new liquidity pool for WLEO - RUNE and that's an exciting reason (and one of my main motivators) for stacking RUNE now while I think it's cheap.
Regular Updates
I'm a big fan of projects that are regularly engaged with their community. I think that's one of the primary indicators of a project that is oriented in a way to provide value as opposed to suck value out of an ecosystem.
The more engaged the founders and project leaders, the more engaged the community. The more engaged the community, the better the end product.
I'm excited to see all of the regular updates out of the Thorchain account on Medium. They just posted a Weekly Dev Update today which talked about the BTC integration I mentioned above as well as some other things in the pipeline. Hopefully one day, we'll also see these dev updates posted on LeoFinance.
Since so many of us are already engaged with their project and sinking our teeth into it, I think this is a great place for them to post updates. I also started tracking their Github loosely and find them to be extremely active.
To me, this is shaping up to be a top 5 crypto for the next decade. I obviously am still in the early stages of learning the nuances of Thorchain, but like I said: every day I learn something new about the project and the more layers I uncover, the more layers I discover.
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