THORChain Investment Calculator
What would buying RUNE have been worth? Pick a plan and a start date and this replays it against real daily THORChain closes.
What RUNE actually did, in the data this page replays
Measured from the 2,201 daily closes this page replays — 4 September 2020 to 13 September 2026, from Binance. Figures are bounded by that window, not by the asset’s whole life.
| History available | 6 years (from Binance) |
|---|---|
| Bought on the first day, held to the last | 0.626× — a loss of 37.4% |
| Highest close in this window | $20.34 on 18 May 2021 |
| Where it sits against that high | 97.5% below |
| Deepest fall | −98.4%, 18 May 2021 → 5 June 2026 |
| Time to get back to that peak | still below it |
| Separate falls of 50% or more | 2 |
| Days spent more than 20% below a previous peak | 91.5% |
| Best calendar year | 2021: +427.8% |
| Worst calendar year | 2025: -87.8% |
| Annualised volatility | 129.6% |
RUNE year by year
First close to last close each year. 2020 and 2026 are partial — the data starts mid-2020 and 2026 is still running.
| Year | Change | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | +43% | partial year |
| 2021 | +427.8% | best full year |
| 2022 | -82.7% | |
| 2023 | +301.1% | |
| 2024 | -16.2% | |
| 2025 | -87.8% | worst full year |
| 2026 | -10.2% | partial year |
The part the calculator does not show you
Held from the first day in this data to the last, RUNE returned 0.626× — a loss of 37.4%. Long holding periods are usually presented as the thing that rescues a volatile asset, and over this particular window for this particular coin, they did not. It is worth setting the calculator above to the full range and seeing that result written out before assuming time fixes an entry.
The deepest fall took RUNE down 98.4%, from $20.34 on 18 May 2021 to $0.321 on 5 June 2026 — 5 years and 1 month of falling. RUNE has not been back to that peak since. Anyone who bought on 18 May 2021 is still waiting, 12 months later — which is the scenario a backtest showing a positive average return quietly averages away.
At 129.6% annualised volatility, RUNE sits in the top band of anything on this site — the drawdown figures above, not the average, are the number to plan around. All RUNE calculators →
Frequently asked questions
＋Would buying RUNE on the first day of this data and holding have made money?
No. Held across the whole window the position ended at 0.626× — a loss of 37.4%. That is worth stating plainly because "hold long enough and it recovers" is the usual advice, and over the 6 years we hold for RUNE it did not happen.
＋What is the worst RUNE has fallen?
98.4% in this data, from 18 May 2021 down to 5 June 2026 — 5 years and 1 month of falling. It has not returned to that peak since, so anyone who bought at the top is still waiting. Bear in mind our RUNE series starts in 2020; a deeper fall before that date would not appear here.
＋How often does RUNE lose half its value?
2 separate falls of 50% or more appear in this data, and the position spent 91.5% of all days more than 20% below a previous peak. A drop of that size is not an exceptional event for this asset — it is a recurring feature of the record, which is the thing to size a position around.
＋What were RUNE's best and worst years?
2021 was the best at +427.8%, and 2025 the worst at -87.8%. The gap between those two is the reason a single average annual return is a poor description of this asset: almost nobody experiences the average, they experience one of the two extremes depending on when they bought.
＋Is 6 years of data enough to trust this backtest?
Reasonably. 6 years spans roughly one full cycle for RUNE — enough for the drawdown figure to mean something, not enough to call it a pattern. The assets here with a decade or more behind them support firmer conclusions.
What to keep in mind for RUNE
RUNE is mechanically leveraged to total network liquidity, so it tends to move further than the assets it swaps in both directions.
A THORChain swap pays the outbound chain's own network fee plus slippage against the pool depth — on thin pools the slippage dominates everything else.
A backtest is one path that already happened. It shows what this plan produced through the exact sequence of prices RUNE went through — not what a similar plan will produce through a sequence nobody has seen yet.