Investors in bitcoin are in panic mode because the controversial terraUSD stablecoin slips farther from its intended $1 peg.
TerraUSD, or UST, sank below 70 cents for the primary time late Monday, as holders continued to flee the token in what some have described as a “bank run.” The token fell as little as 62 cents before regaining ground to trade at 90 cents Tuesday, in accordance with Coinbase data.
Created by Singapore-based Terraform Labs in 2018, UST is what’s referred to as an “algorithmic” stablecoin. A part of the Terra blockchain project, it’s meant to trace the worth of the dollar, like fellow stablecoins tether and USDC.
Nevertheless, unlike with those cryptocurrencies, Terra doesn’t have money and other assets held in a reserve to back its token. As a substitute, it uses a posh mixture of code — alongside a sister token called luna — to stabilize prices.
It is vital for bitcoin investors as Luna Foundation Guard, a company supporting the Terra project, is sitting on billions of dollars in bitcoin that would potentially be dumped onto the market at any point.
“Every skilled investor in crypto has one eye on UST today, watching to see if it will possibly maintain its peg to the dollar,” said Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management. “There’s clearly significant risk available in the market.”
In easy terms, the Terra protocol destroys and creates recent units of UST and luna to regulate supply. When the worth of UST falls below the dollar, it will possibly be taken out of circulation and exchanged for luna, making UST’s supply more scarce and boosting its price — not less than, that is the way it should work in theory.
To further complicate things, Terra’s creator, Do Kwon, bought $3.5 billion value of bitcoin to offer a backstop for UST in times of crisis. The speculation was that UST could eventually be redeemed for bitcoin as a substitute of luna, but that is untested and hasn’t yet been put into practice.
On Monday, Kwon’s Luna Foundation Guard said it will lend $750 million value of bitcoin to trading firms to “help protect the UST peg,” while an extra 750 million UST will likely be lent out to purchase more bitcoin “as market conditions normalize.”
In a follow-up tweet, the organization said it had withdrawn 37,000 bitcoins — value greater than $1 billion at current prices — to lend out. “Little or no” of the borrowed bitcoins have been spent, Luna Foundation Guard said, however it is “currently getting used to purchase” UST.
Several crypto investors are also frightened that Luna Foundation Guard might need sold, or will sell, a big portion of its bitcoin to prop up UST. Amid all of this uncertainty, UST’s decline has sent shock waves throughout the crypto market.
Bitcoin, the world’s largest digital currency, briefly fell below $30,000, hitting its lowest price since July 2021. As of seven:00 a.m. ET, bitcoin was trading at $31,324, down around 5% within the last 24 hours. It’s now down greater than 50% from its November all-time high.
Luna, UST’s counterpart, has roughly halved in value up to now 24 hours. It was last trading at a price of $32.
Adding to UST holders’ woes, Binance, the biggest crypto exchange by market volume, temporarily suspended withdrawals of each UST and luna “resulting from a high volume of pending withdrawal transactions,” citing network congestion.
Binance has since resumed withdrawals, and says it “will proceed to observe” network conditions.
“I feel the market is expecting some forced selling here on the a part of Terra and the reserve,” Nic Carter, co-founder of Coin Metrics, told CNBC. “It’s a calamity but very expected. No algorithmic stablecoin has ever succeeded and this is not any exception.”
He added that the issue with UST is that it’s largely “backed by faith.”
“It is not fully guaranteed, it’s definitely not fully backed by reserves,” he told CNBC. “It was really just backed by faith within the issuer effectively.”
Terraform Labs didn’t reply to multiple requests for comment.
