The price of the native asset for cross-chain decentralized exchange THORChain (RUNE) has spiked by 34% in a day following the activating of synthetic assets on the network.

At the time of writing the price had settled back to a 21% gain over the past 24 hours to sit at $5.27..

Crypto synthetics or synths are derivative tokens of other digital assets that are pegged to the value of the underlying collateralized asset such as Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH). In THORChain’s variation, the project has opted to back its synths with 50% of the underlying asset and 50% in RUNE. The activation went live earlier today and synthetics such as sBTC and sETH are now able to be traded on the network.

THORSwap Finance highlighted the advantages of the synthetic assets via a March 10 blog post, noting that "synths have great utility for traders and arbitrageurs, as they can be transacted nearly instantly and at a fraction of the cost compared to native L1 swaps.”

“In the future, it will allow THORChads to also earn yield with Synths thanks to vaults and provide other exciting THORFi utilities," the post added.

The activation went live earlier today and synthetics such as sBTC and sETH are now able to be traded on the network. The price of RUNE has responded positively, up by more than 20% to sit at $5.27.

Earlier this week, the team highlighted its roadmap moving forward, as it vowed to make “decentralized liquidity 10X” larger than centralized. After ticking off synths from the list, other significant future landmarks include decentralized finance (DeFi) – dubbed THORFi in this instance — services such as lending and saving.

Thorchain clocking in $40M of volume on day of synths launch A good startBullish $RUNE pic.twitter.com/rgJPu4MFeI

Ano