[The Exiled]

‘The Guilt is Unbearable’: UST-Luna Investors discuss the 99.99% Crypto Crash

It took less than a week for the third largest stablecoin and its ecosystem to become virtually worthless, wiping out countless traders' savings. The cryptocurrency market is in the middle of a widespread crash, causing investors serious financial pain with no clear way out. The most dramatic fall yet has been the collapse of the $30 billion Terra ecosystem: its token Luna, its algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST)—which is supposed to remain pegged 1:1 to the dollar—and associated lending protocol Anchor. The implosion has caused an unimaginable amount of pain for would-be investors and has exacerbated an ongoing sell-off across crypto markets more generally. UST is currently trading at $0.15, and Luna has fallen from over $100 in April to $0.0001 today, effectively “going to zero,” in crypto-speak. Luna’s most dramatic fall has happened in the last week, with the token falling 99.99 percent from its $80 price a week ago. The price of Anchor’s token also fell dramatically, from $2 to $0.09.

The founder of the South Korea-based firm behind Terra-Luna, Terraform Labs, is Do Kwon, a normally prodigiously loud Twitter poster who regularly dismissed critics as “poor” in replies and said in one interview that “95 percent [of coins] are going to die, but there's also entertainment in watching companies die too.” Now, he hasn’t posted on Twitter in days and seems to have requested emergency personal protection from police. Terra isn’t just another random crypto project: It was propped up by venture capitalists who pumped $150 million into the ecosystem last year, potentially giving investors confidence in the project. Investors included major players such as Pantera Capital, Arrington Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Galaxy Digital. Now, amid the collapse, most people have found themselves drowning in a bloodbath, with some investors saying they have lost their life savings, taking to online forums to share their despair or suicidal ideation.

For the most part, it seems unlikely that much of anything will be done for those wiped out because of the collapse of the third-largest stablecoin. So far, all talk of bailouts has largely been limited to just that: talk. Enthusiasts who were told that UST and Luna were the future are in the hole. Trading of the coins has been halted on multiple exchanges, meaning what little some had left is likely inaccessible for the foreseeable future. Regular people caught up in Terra-Luna are unlikely to see a bailout. Instead, things will move on as they always have: The backers and financiers will do what they can, while the regular people who invested will suffer what they must and scrabble for some kind of fix.

Izvor: VICE/Motherboard