Terra’s Luna Classic (ticker: LUNC) has bounced back 12% from a recent low of $0.00008986 posted exactly a fortnight ago.
LUNC currently changes hands at $0.0001067, up around 10% from a week ago. It has shed a fraction (1.2%) in the last 24 hours, according to data by CoinGecko.
This rally is mystifying considering the ongoing legal troubles against LUNC’s creators, Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon. Just this week, a former Terra development team leader testified against his former boss in a Seoul court.
That same day, a press release from the South Korean police stated that Montenegrin police extradited Han Chang-joon, Terraform’s former CFO, to South Korea.
Both Han and Kwon await criminal proceedings for multiple alleged financial crimes, including fraud. Kwon is currently still in Montenegrin custody after he appealed not to be extradited to the US, where he is also wanted.
Still, a glance at Luna Classic’s price performance chart shows that in spite of all the bad press, the token appears to be rebounding to its former level of $0.00012 set a month ago.
Its relative strength index (RSI) is currently 55, but it continues to seesaw between 45 and 65, meaning that LUNC remains a volatile token.
Remember when LUNC wiped out the market?
LUNC is the renamed version of the original LUNA (V1) token. LUNA V1 played an integral role in pegging Terra’s failed UST stablecoin to the US dollar.
UST was pitched to consumers as a so-called “algorithmic stablecoin”. A burn/mint mechanism was supposed to maintain UST’s $1 value. To create one UST token, you had to burn $1 LUNA, and vice versa.
The mechanism failed in May 2022 when interest rates declined on UST’s number one use: locking it up in Anchor to generate yield.
The cuts were due to the passing of a proposal by the community two months earlier. A subsequent mass exodus from UST then caused LUNA V1 to enter a hyperinflationary spiral.
The total token supply went from three quarters of a billion on May 5 to a staggering 7 trillion, where is currently sits.
The ensuing carnage had (and arguably still has) wide repercussions for the entire industry. It set off a recession known grimly as “Crypto Winter,” which saw many companies exposed to Terra’s ecosystem filing for bankruptcy, including lenders like Celsius, and Voyage, exchanges like Vauld and FTX, and hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC).
An Alt with stronger fundamentals.
There are too many factors stacked against Luna Classic for it to ever reach $1. From the bad press around its creators to the hyper-inflated supply, it’s not likely the community will see a revival. It currently trundles along as the 110th biggest token by market capitalization. Surprisingly, it’s beating LUNA V2, which is lagging at 140, but in general, the Terraform ecosystem and everything that came out of it is toast.
Altcoin fans are much better off diversifying their portfolios by looking into the tokens underpinning some of Web3’s exciting upcoming video games.
Straddling the worlds of betting, crypto, good old fashioned beat-em-up gaming, Meme Kombat lets players pit their favorite meme stars against each other as observers can place their bets. Like the world of Esports, the games may be digital but the stakes are very real.
The game’s native $MK token is currently being sold at $0.279 as part of its ICO. It has already raised $8 million, as it heads towards its $10 million presale target.
We did it memers!
The $8 million milestone has been smashed🥊 pic.twitter.com/QZMpfjHSgv
— Meme Kombat (@Meme_Kombat) February 2, 2024
Disclaimer: Crypto is a high-risk asset class. This article is provided for informational purposes and does not constitute investment advice. You could lose all of your capital.
