What happened? Terra debacle exposes flaws plaguing the crypto industry
The past week has been a dark period in the history of crypto, with the total market capitalization of this industry dipping as low as $1.2 trillion for the first time since July 2021. The turmoil, in large part, has been due to the real-time disintegration of Terra, a Cosmos-based protocol that powers a suite of algorithmic stablecoins.
Approximately a week ago, Terra (LUNA) ranked among the 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies in the market, with a single token trading at a price point of $85. By May 11, however, the price of the asset had dropped to $15. And, 48-hours on, the token has lost 99.98% of its value currently trading at a price point of $0.00003465.
Due to ongoing collapse, Terra’s other associated offering, TerraUSD (UST) — an algorithmic stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar in a 1:1 ratio — has lost its peg to the dollar and is presently trading at $0.079527.
As highlighted above, the Terra protocol is driven via the use of two core tokens, namely UST and LUNA. Network participants are afforded the ability to mint UST by burning LUNA at the Terra Station portal. Simply put, one can envision the Terra economy as being one that consists primarily of two pools: i.e. one for TerraUSD and one for LUNA.
In order to maintain UST’s value, the LUNA supply pool either adds to or subtracts from its coffers such that clients are required to burn LUNA in order to mint UST and vice versa. All of these actions are incentivized by the platform’s algorithmic market module making UST’s functional framework substantially different from that of its closest stablecoin rivals Tether (UDST) and USD Coin (USDC), both of whom are backed by fiat assets directly.
To better illustrate the working of UST (or algorithmic stablecoins
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