LUNA Drops 20% As Investors Panic, What Is The Link With Anchor And UST?

Reynaldo Marquez

3 years ago

3 mins read

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LUNA has been dropping sharply in the past few days, deeper than larger cryptocurrencies. As of press time, Terra’s native token moves on critical support barely above $50 with a 16.4% loss in the last 24 hours.

Luna Terra LUNAUSDT Anchor — LUNA on a downtrend in the 4-hour chart. Source: LUNAUSDT Tradingview

According to Wu Blockchain, the token lost as much as 20% in the last day. Apparently, retail investors have been panic selling their LUNA funds due to concerns about several of its dApps and UST. The latter is one of many stablecoins operating on the Terra ecosystem which is based on a supply and demand mechanism to maintain its peg.

As NewsBTC reported back in December, UST has been gaining relevance across the DeFi sectors. The stablecoin allows holders access to the Anchor Protocol, Terra-based lending and borrowing application that consistently offered its users a 19.5% compounding yield on their UST deposits.

This rate surpasses that of its competitors, some of which have issues offering a 10% yield with similar products. However, the current downtrend in the crypto market has heavily impacted LUNA and the Terra ecosystem.

Some users believe the ecosystem as a whole could be in danger as a result of a reduction in Anchor’s reserves which according to some projections could reach $0 in the coming weeks. Without these funds, the protocol would be unable to pay off its users and due to Terra’s mechanism, it could trigger a fresh leg down across its assets.

The pegged in UST has been offered in the past days, as more users seem to believe this theory. Thus, panic spreads amongst sellers looking to mitigate their losses. As of press time, UST has seen an important recovery as it hit a multi-month low of 0.98 versus the U.S. dollar.

UST LUNA LUNAUSDT — UST recovering its pegged on the 4-hour chart. Source: Tradingview

Terra (LUNA) Inventor Addresses Concerns Around Anchor

Do Kwon, co-founder, and CEO of Terraform Labs, the entity behind Terra’s ecosystem, recently addressed the controversy generated around Anchor and UST. In an attempt to counterbalance the FUD, as some LUNA holder has called it, Do Kwon emphasized Anchor’s objectives.

The first, he wrote on a Twitter thread, is to make market yields on stablecoins less volatile, while increasing the capital efficiency of the platform. Anchor’s Yield Reserve is a “centerpiece” to address these issues, but this component of the protocol can operate with a surplus or a deficit. Kwon said:

Recently as leverage started to wind down from crypto markets, deposits have gone up a lot and borrowing down. The yield reserve has been running at a deficit to maintain the deposit yield.

Users seem to believe that the Yield Reserve, Kwon said, should “always operate at a surplus”, and that the YR depletion will “have disastrous consequences”. The co-founder of Terraform Labs said that Anchor’s Yield Reserve was always designed to be used on current market conditions.

On the second widespread concern by users, Kwon said that if the protocol runs out of funds in its Yield Reserve, it will “operate as a regular money market” still offering users around 15% to 16% in incentives. Therefore, he concluded that the protocol, and by extension the ecosystem, “will be fine”.

In the future, the team at Terraform Labs will make improvements to reduce “LUNA dominance in Anchor collateral under 40%”. In that way, a similar situation could be prevented. In the meantime, Kwon said:

I am resolved to find ways of subsidizing the yield reserve. Anchor is still in the growth phase, and maintaining the most attractive yield in DeFi stable will strengthen that growth & build up moats.

Reynaldo Marquez

A literature major, Reynaldo Márquez has been deeply immersed in the crypto industry since 2017. His journey began with translating articles for various crypto news outlets, a role he took on with zeal. In 2018, amidst a challenging market, he embraced his first writing assignment, demonstrating his unwavering commitment to the nascent industry and the promise of change it bears for many people worldwide.
In March 2021, he joined the prestigious crypto news outlet NewsBTC and Bitcoinist, where he not only reported on the latest crypto news but also had the privilege of interviewing some of the industry's most influential figures. A year later, his dedication and hard work were recognized, and he was promoted to Managing Editor, a position he currently holds with pride.
He believes in honesty, good communication, hard work, and the power of cryptocurrency and its potential to transform people's lives, especially those alienated by the legacy financial system. Born in 1992 in Venezuela, Reynaldo is familiar with how governments and central banks can negatively affect people, their everyday lives, and their futures by creating inflation and erasing their hopes for a better future. Thus, like many Venezuelans, he embraced this new technology to help him and his family navigate difficult times.
In another life, Reynaldo would have pursued a career as an investigator, most likely tracking down the origins of the Cyberpunk movement with the publication of William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer.’ The intersection between fiction and reality, with the materialization of Bitcoin in 2009, would have allowed him to dive deep into the crypto sphere as something more than a financial phenomenon but also a cultural shift in society that was brewing since the XX century, and maybe even sooner, in the XIX century with the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience.’
But that’s for another life. In this one, Reynaldo has been trading to improve his trading skills. Since 2023, he has been trying to learn Python to create successful strategies and find ways to execute them. It is a difficult task, which continues to keep him busy today and will most likely continue to keep him busy in the near and long term.
In his free time, he enjoys lifting heavy objects, reading, watching movies, and listening to his favorite music. Some of his favorite authors are Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Mario Vargas Llosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Rafael Cadenas, and many others. Lately, he has been primarily interested in reading about dystopic societies, a topic that deeply resonates with the crypto industry.
Since 2023, he has lived in Spain with his wife. He loves the weather, the food, and the people and their culture. They both expect to travel much more within the country they now call home and beyond its border. He hopes to retire with his wife, maybe in a quiet place near a beach, but most likely in a city close to a library and a university with his kids and, hopefully, grandkids.

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