Thorchain halted after $10.8M cross-chain exploit — RUNE craters 12%!

Thorchain paused all trading and signing operations on Friday after an attacker drained approximately $10.8 million across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BSC, and Base. On-chain investigator ZachXBT flagged the exploit via Telegram, with Arkham Intelligence tracking the attacker's wallets: 3,443 ETH ($7.77M), 36.85 BTC ($2.97M), and 96.6 BNB ($66K). The protocol's Mimir governance module flipped both trading halt and signing halt parameters to active, with a node pause running roughly 12 hours and 42 minutes from block 26190429.

RUNE, Thorchain's native token, fell 12% on the news. No post-mortem identifying the specific attack vector has been published, leaving the mechanism unresolved. Cross-chain bridges and liquidity protocols remain the most exploited category in DeFi — Chainalysis puts cumulative bridge-related theft above $2.8 billion since 2021, and Thorchain has now added a fresh chapter…