In the middle of May, the blockchain protocol Terra that built its economy around fiat-pegged stablecoins, TerraUSD (UST) in particular, unexpectedly collapsed. As a result of a large $300-million token sale, the price of UST crashed and lost its $1 peg. Consequently, the price of Terra’s governance token, LUNA, also demonstrated a dramatic drop.
However, as disillusioned investors were ready to sink into despair, Terraform Labs announced its plan to bring the protocol back to life and release a brand-new chain. The new LUNA token will also replace its predecessor. The former chain and token won’t just sink into oblivion — they will soon be known as Terra Classic and LUNA Classic, co-existing with the new blockchain.
New beginnings
Terra’s return has been met with enthusiasm, as UST and LUNA investors were promised their fair share of LUNA 2.0 tokens. The airdrop date was set for May 27, and on that date, nearly a third of 1 billion tokens were allocated to the community of tokenholders, stakers and developers. The rest will be distributed within a few years.
As for the new chain, it will not be a fork of Terra Classic. Instead, it will be built from scratch, starting from the genesis block. It won’t share any history with the previous chain. UST stablecoin, however, is not going to be a part of the comeback.
HitBTC has added the new token. Since May 28, new spot pairs have been available for LUNA paired with three other currencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Tether (USDT). Leverage margin pairs with five-fold returns are available to users on LUNA-BTC and LUNA-USDT.