THORChain Pauses Lending and Saving Services Amid Solvency Concerns

Decentralized, cross-chain “liquidity protocol” THORChain has paused its lending and saving services after the community raised concerns about the project’s solvency.

Decentralized, cross-chain “liquidity protocol” THORChain has paused its lending and saving services after community members raised concerns about the project’s solvency.

Aside from its core function as a cross-chain decentralized exchange (DEX), THORChain offers generous bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) collateralized “0% interest, no liquidations, and no expiration” loans as well as “Savers” vaults on native tokens.

.@THORChain is insolventIn the event of any large debt redemption and/or savers & synths deleveraging, it is certain that TC cannot meet its bitcoin and eth denominated obligations.Validators decided to pause the network while they vote a restructuring plan🔽🧵

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THORChain community member TCB highlighted total liabilities of around $200 million between the two programs, backed by just $107 million of (non-locked) liquidity. The thread explains how the system relies on minting the project’s token, RUNE, and has been compared to Terra’s UST and LUNA.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, the price of RUNE briefly dropped from $3 to $2 before recovering slightly on the news that the features had been paused. The token is currently down 16%, at around $2.35.

Concerns around the leverage had been building for some time. TCB added that the system had become “so complicated that only a handful of people fully understands how the leveraged feature & liquidity works with each other and affects the underlying assets.”

Conscious of the danger of a bank run, THORChain’s “founder, engineer, and explorer,” JP, recommended pausing the two features to avoid a potential “death spiral” of depositors racing for the exit.

If $RUNE hits $2.50 I will be recommending to every node I delegate with to Pause Lending via Node Mimir. 1) Pause lending2) Tokenise positions on App Layer asap (with maybe even $RUJI incentives)3) 10% System Income into payback fund to accumulate RUNE to fund payouts4)…

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The 90-day restructuring plan includes tokenizing the liabilities while dedicating 10% of protocol fees to accumulating RUNE and rebuilding the backing. JP goes on to describe the approach as “rip the bandaid off,” confident that “all loans [will be] honored over time. No big deal.”

Some have praised the plan, noting that the lending portion of the protocol is relatively small when compared to the “very profitable” DEX operations, while others remain unconvinced. Others still have pointed to the history of some of the project’s shills as red flags.

In its recently-published year-end report for 2024, THORChain pointed to reassuring numbers. Across the whole network, it states that $56.2 billion worth of swaps were made via $329 million of liquidity, leading to over $30 million in direct swap fees.

At the height of the last bull run, THORChain was hit by back-to-back exploits in July of 2021, for assets valued around $5 million and $8 million at the time. Additional losses resulted from prematurely re-enabling trading after the first hack.

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