LUNA Classic (LUNC)
LUNC is the native currency of Terra. It was used to stabilize the price of the protocol's stablecoins. LUNA holders could become validators, so they could help secure networks and earn rewards. Moreover, they were able to submit and vote on governance proposals. The LUNA token and UST, a Terra algorithmic stablecoin, depended on each other. LUNA backed UST and was burned when demand for UST was raised.
LUNС Collapse
However, everything changed at the beginning of May, when UST began to plunge to 10 cents. LUNA fell from an all-time high of $119,51 to almost zero. Terraform Labs tried to stabilize UST and LUNA through its BTC reserves, but they didn’t manage to return the 1:1 peg of UST to USD. The crypto world witnessed the first “crypto bank run” in history after the algorithmic stablecoin UST depegged.
Terraform Lab co-founder Do Kwon immediately started to develop new plans for LUNA revival, suggesting a new chain without UST. However, the community criticized the hard fork idea.
Since UST was in the TOP-3 by capitalization, Terra made a lot of noise, and the network held second place in the decentralized finance sector right after Ethereum. For this reason, the validators voted to revive the blockchain and keep the Terra (LUNA) brand. So that’s how LUNA 2.0 has appeared.
LUNA 2.0
At the end of May 2022, Terraform Lab announced launching LUNA 2.0. The current LUNA token is rebranded to LUNC (LUNA Classic), and the new token LUNA 2.0 has the ticker LUNA. Holders of LUNC, USTC (UST Classic), and aUST (staked UST) were airdropped LUNA tokens from the new chain. It is not a hard fork but a genesis chain. The apps on the previous chain LUNC don’t pre-exist on the revived chain. UST also is not supported by the revived Terra.
The mainnet was activated on May 28, 2022, with the airdrop for eligible LUNA and UST holders. Many exchanges have supported the Terra Revival. For example, Binance has recently revealed that they have been working with Terra on the Luna 2.0 to support its holder’s community, so the exchange does welcome both the new LUNA chain and token. Moreover, the revived LUNA will be backed by Huobi, Bitfinex, Bitrue, HitBTC, FTX, and us - Guarda Wallet.
