RUNE Rises Nearly 10% as Binance Hack Funds Move Through THORChain

RUNE, THORChain’s native token, rose nearly 10% over 24 hours as funds from Binance’s Oct. 29 theft moved through the protocol in activity the FBI tied to North Korean group TraderTraitor.

The FBI attributed the attack to TraderTraitor on Nov. 1 and urged THORChain node operators and other crypto services to block associated addresses and funds. The attackers split stolen Solana (SOL) across wallets, swapped it for USD Coin (USDC), moved the stablecoin to Ethereum and bought Ether (ETH). They then used THORChain to exchange ETH for Bitcoin (BTC). Some funds had earlier moved from TRON to THORChain.

By Nov. 1, about $48.3 million had been swapped through THORChain, with about $42.7 million received after fees and slippage of roughly 12%. Binance said it had frozen about $2.85 billion of the stolen funds and used company funds to cover about 98% of affected tokens.

Bitcoin and Ether cannot be frozen by an issuer the way USDC and USDT can, making cross-chain swaps harder to reverse.