Cross-chain swap protocol THORChain’s native token RUNE surged more than 13% to $0.67 from a local low of $0.59 shortly after news of the Binance hack broke. The price rally coincided with on-chain findings placing THORChain at the center of fund movements from the exploit.
On-chain researcher ZachXBT revealed that stolen funds from Binance were routed through THORChain. The same channel was also used to move assets from the Bitget exchange hack in September 2026. All stolen assets from both incidents were funneled through the swap protocol before being consolidated into a single deposit address on the Ethereum network.
Analytics firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis linked the attacks on Binance and Bitget to the hacker group TraderTraitor. The cybercrime group is confirmed to be directly affiliated with North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
Long History of Cross-Chain Asset Laundering
Using THORChain as a conduit for illicit fund transfers is not new to the crypto ecosystem. The protocol previously served as a primary laundering route for assets stolen in the $1.4 billion Bybit exchange breach in February 2025. The cross-chain swap route was also used to split fund flows from the $388 million Bitget exchange exploit.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen previously called on THORChain operators to promptly blacklist the hackers’ wallet addresses. Chen emphasized that decentralization should not be used as a shield to facilitate illicit transactions in the crypto market.
Blacklist Refusal and Community Tensions
THORChain management rejected the calls for blacklisting. They argued that the protocol’s architectural design was built from the start without the capability to filter or block swap transactions from specific individual addresses. The exchange system is designed to run autonomously without a centralized blacklist function.
Internal tensions erupted within the THORChain community over this stance of extreme neutrality. Core developer Pluto stepped down from the project, while validator group TCB threatened to pull their validation nodes from the network in protest against the lack of mitigation measures.
For validators like TCB and remaining developers, the dispute is no longer just a technical debate over network code. Management’s steadfast refusal to introduce transaction-filtering features now clashes directly with the departure of key personnel and the threat of declining node count that secures the protocol’s decentralization.
Reported by Cointelegraph.
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Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only, not financial advice. Cryptocurrency assets are highly volatile and carry significant risk. Always do your own research (DYOR) and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
