In May 2022, the Terra blockchain suffered an attack knocking UST off peg and causing the price of LUNA to collapse below a penny. This page is no longer maintained but is kept for historical reference only. More information on what happened can be found here.
Today we learn about the Terra ecosystem - how to acquire native LUNA and UST and putting them to work earning passive income.
Today I sync'd up with Josh, BitLift Discord member and fellow LUNA-tic, to share everything we've learned about the terra ecosystem from how to acquire native LUNA and UST, how to store it safely and how to put it to work earning passive income.
Intro To Terra & Luna
- How did you get introduced to Terra?
- Gerbz's stable coin investment thesis
- Incredible interviews with Terra founder Do Kwon
- Today, Anchor is the main attraction for most people to the Terra ecosystem
- The Terra ecosystem is word soup
- Terra is the blockchain, LUNA is the base asset, UST is the stable coin
- Terra = Earth and Luna = Moon and they keep each other in balance
- A bear market in crypto is a bull market in stable coins.
- For every $1 of UST in existence, $1USD worth of LUNA is "burned"
- This peg appears to be maintained by hedge funds, which isn't cool, but White Whale is democratizing this
- Terra's inception:
- Not a ton of info about Terra's launch...
- "Meanwhile, Danial Shin, the founder behind a USD 1.4 billion startup unicorn called TMON, today announced that he has raised USD 32 million for a new stablecoin project called Terra. This seed round was notably backed by the Binance exchange, as well as Polychain, FBG Capital, Hashed, 1kx, Kenetic Capital, Arrington XRP and others." (source)
- Terra was started as "crypto for e-commerce". The first app was Chai.
- Terra is built on Cosmos, a "next gen" blockchain ecosystem. Cosmos can be broken into three pieces:
- Cosmos SDK: The world’s most popular blockchain application framework.
- Tendermint: The best-in-class BFT consensus engine for your blockchain:
- IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication): The standard protocol for inter-blockchain communication.
- Terra's growth strategy
- To make UST the most useful decentralized stable coin in DeFi
- Investing: Mirror, Pylon
- Spending: Chai, NFTs
- Saving: Anchor
- And bridging UST to every possible blockchain
- Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Harmony, Solana, Polygon, Cosmos IBC
Buying LUNA & UST
- Wrapped UST and LUNA available on Coinbase and any Ethereum DEX
- To move wrapped ERC-20 assets to the Terra blockchain, you need to use the Terra Bridge
- Exchanges with native Terra assets:
- Kucoin
- Binance
- Crypto.com (LUNA only, no UST)
- Nexo (Coming soon? LUNA only, no UST)
Terra Wallets
- Terra Station - the native Terra blockchain wallet has a Chrome (and brave) extension, mobile app on for iOS and Android and a web app.
- We prefer the extension over the mobile app because you can connect with your Ledger hardware wallet.
- The Terra Station web app is the main way to stake your LUNA.
- Trust Wallet by the Binance team also supports native Terra assets.
Terra Transaction Fees
How do transaction fees work on Terra blockchain?
- Gas - Validators can set their own minimum gas fee and transactions are FIFO — not based on gas amount like Ethereum
- Stability - Special tax on all stable coin transactions to help maintain stability
- Tobin - Tax on stable coin swaps to discourage front-running
- Spread - Tax on LUNA swaps — Auto-inflates and shrinks to keep LUNA and stable coin pair in equilibrium
Putting LUNA/UST to work
- Stake LUNA to secure the network directly within the Terra Station web app
- You can see the current staking returns on SmartStake's Terra Dashboard
- It takes 21 days to unstake! And no rewards while you wait.
- Earn airdrops from lots of new apps launching on Terra for staking LUNA
- Some apps airdropping to LUNA stakers include: Mirror (MIR), Anchor (ANC), Pylon (MINE), Nexus (PSI), Valkyrie (VKR), Orion (ORION), Apollo (APOLLO)
- And lots more dApps coming soon to Terra, many of which will have airdrops.
- TerraDrops - Claim all airdrops across the Terra ecosystem with one click, sorta.
Terra Ecosystem
- Core dApps by Terra Form Labs (TFL)
- Anchor - We'll do an entire episode on Anchor. Read our guide to earning on Anchor.
- Mirror - Public stock trading on terra
- Tarraswap - The first (and biggest) dex on Terra
- Provide liquidity (LP) to TerraSwap pools. Examples: ~23% LUNA/bLUNA and ~150% LUNA/UST
- Two places to see TerraSwap pools/returns are coinhall and alpac4
- dApps by Delphi Labs
- Mars - Money market
- Astroport - Next gen Terra dex
- Orion - Anchor to other chains
- Levana - Leveraged trading DEX
- Angel - Anchor charitable donations
- Other dApps we're excited a bout...
- Nexus - Automated LTV to maximize returns on collateral in Anchor
- Stader - Liquid staking and automated harvesting
- Alice - Debit card built on UST. Coming soon.
- Kujira Orca - Buy liquidated assets from Anchor at a discount.
- White Whale - Contribute to keeping Terra UST pegged to $1
- ApeBoard - A dashboard for viewing your crypto across various chains including Terra