Terra Comeback? LUNA Surges 166% After LUNA Classic’s Own Rise - Decrypt (2024)

The twin collapses of Terra’s UST stablecoin and LUNA cryptocurrency are widely blamed for at least partially causing May’s market-wide crypto crash, resulting in a cascade of crumbling crypto valuations. But after all the turmoil—believe it or not—the rebooted LUNA and the rebranded LUNA Classic (LUNC) have both skyrocketed in recent days.

LUNA has increased in value by 166% over the last 24 hours to reach a current price of over $5, per data from CoinGecko. It’s a surprising surge for a coin that has barely budged since early June, sticking close to the $2 mark. The price popped as high as $6.87 over the last day, marking a peak 247% increase since the start of the day Friday.

While it shares the name of the cryptocurrency that lost nearly 100% of its value in May, LUNA is actually a new coin created by Terra founder Do Kwon to support the rebooted Terra blockchain. The newly rebooted LUNA blockchain was forked from the code of the previous one, and is Kwon’s attempt to try and revitalize the fallen crypto ecosystem.

Meanwhile, LUNA Classic—the original LUNA with a new name—saw its own sizable rise in value just before the new LUNA repeated the feat. Although it’s down 20% over the past 24 hours as the speculative craze fades, LUNC is still up nearly 56% this week at its current price of $0.00043.

In the case of LUNA Classic, there are some apparent signs pointing to its increasing value. The LUNC ecosystem is now in the hands of community holders, and they’ve been voting on and instituting recent changes—such a 1.2% network tax on transactions, which will be used to purchase and burn (or permanently destroy) LUNC to pare down the total supply.

Such activity could be spurring rising value in LUNC as the community attempts to find a path forward, but at a current value of a fraction of a penny per token, LUNC is still down nearly 100% from the peak price of $119 set (as LUNA) in April.

Why the rebooted LUNA is up so big today is less clear. It could be an aftershock from LUNC’s momentum, effectively piggybacking on it while catapulting to even greater percentage gains in the process. Terra also recently launched a claim process for LUNA Classic holders who didn’t receive the new token when the network relaunched, with 19.5 million LUNA available.

LUNA 2.0 launched in late May and quickly peaked at nearly $19 per token. It’s currently down 73% from its all-time high, according to CoinGecko.

Even so, LUNA is vastly outperforming the wider crypto market today as the largest gainer in the top 100 cryptocurrencies ranked by market cap. The overall market is up more than 6% today, with leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin up by 10%.