THORChain Records $3.82 Billion in Q3 Trading Amid Earlier Halt
Key Facts
THORChain processed about $3.82 billion in trading volume in the third quarter of 2026 and collected about $5.77 million in swap fees, according to its quarterly report. Those figures put the protocol’s activity at the center of coverage of claims that it halted on October 31, but available sources do not confirm that halt or details of the fault attributed to the Ethereum network. The number of chains reportedly affected has also not been confirmed, nor has the account of a double refund of a 10 ETH deposit. These details therefore cannot be presented as established facts. Separately, Chainalysis said the Binance hack began on October 29 and that unauthorized transfers totaled about $6.4 billion.
Chainalysis described the transfers of about $6.4 billion as the largest theft in cryptocurrency history. The company attributed the hack to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group, citing on-chain activity after the breach. But its public statement on the incident does not mention a THORChain halt or link it to the movement of funds or efforts to slow their laundering. The company said about $2.8 billion of the stolen funds had been frozen when it published its report on October 30. It also pointed to thousands of transactions over a short period and said this suggested the attackers used automation to conceal the funds’ trail.
THORChain recorded an earlier halt in late August, according to its third-quarter report, after nodes disagreed on the network’s state. The halt lasted two days, before a stabilization round ended on September 17 and the network returned to normal operations. The report said the halt occurred on August 26 and 27, and that contracts in the Rujira layer produced different results across nodes, preventing them from agreeing on the network’s state. This provides operational context for an earlier disruption but does not establish that a new halt occurred on October 31. The quarterly report also does not identify a link between the earlier halt and the Binance hack described by Chainalysis.
THORChain’s mechanism, according to developer documentation, requires additional confirmations from Ethereum and some other chains to protect transactions from reorganization. The documentation ties the number of confirmations to the transaction value and block reward, and describes the aim as reaching economic finality, making reorganization economically unviable. Official emergency procedures call for halting the entire network for 720 blocks, or about an hour and a half, to allow for investigation and corrective action. A vote can then be held to halt operations on a specific chain. The documentation explains tools for managing network risks but does not confirm that any were used in the alleged October 31 incident.
Network reports show activity fluctuated in the preceding period: swap volume reached $2.40 billion in September, compared with $613 million in August. The September report said most of the increase was concentrated in a single window, with a large share linked to late-month flows following the Bitget hack. System revenue rose to $3.01 million in September from $615,000 in August, with a large share of the month’s revenue concentrated on the days of those flows. For the third quarter as a whole, trading volume reached $3.82 billion and swap fees totaled $5.77 million. These figures show the scale of activity and revenue without establishing an effect from the October 31 incident.
RUNE/USD closed at $0.703 on October 31, compared with $0.65 the previous day, according to EL7 data. In an update published on October 21, THORChain said network reliability fixes included improvements to recover from reorganization states. The upgrade report made Monero activation conditional on a follow-up release, v3.21.1. The quarterly report also set rules for future stability, including that base-layer queries return the same result on every node and that contract execution be bounded. The October update did not set a date for the v3.21.1 release, while RUNE’s daily price move does not establish that a halt occurred or explain its cause.