Cointelegraph Consulting: A look at Terra’s ecosystem
Terra’s native staking token, LUNA, was one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies of 2021, with gains north of 13,000%. Terra has also surpassed Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in total locked value with $17.62 billion, making it the second-biggest DeFi chain just after Ethereum.
Much of this growth is due to Terra’s ecosystem, with a community of developers continually building decentralized applications on top of Terra. But it may come as a surprise to know that before there were hundreds of apps built on Terra, there were only two that existed at the start of 2021 in the Mirror Protocol and Chai.
Mirror allows users to create synthetic assets, mimicking the price behavior of traditional and digital financial assets. Traders use Mirror to gain exposure to these markets without holding or owning the underlying asset. Chai, on the other hand, is a payments app operating in South Korea with more than 2.5 million users. These apps were created on the basis of real-world utility, providing practical use for users and furthering cryptocurrency adoption.
Its third core app, Anchor Protocol, was only launched on the mainnet in March 2021, but it quickly became a popular yield farming protocol in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. Anchor is designed to generate yields in Terra’s stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST), by locking up an equivalent LUNA or Ether (ETH). So far, the total collateral value locked in Anchor has grown to $5.2 billion, according to the official website, which is already a 4,375% change from the first day of its launch.
Collateral growth coincides with the expansion of its user base, increasing daily at about 440 users, which, compared to Mirror, is growing at nearly three times the pace. The increase in the user
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