LUNA Meltdown Doomed To Get Worse After Shocking Departure Of Terraform Labs Legal Team ⋆ ZyCrypto

Doom and gloom pervade the Terra ecosystem as the in-house legal team flees Terraform Labs, the development company behind the ill-fated Terra blockchain. Their departure follows last week’s unrecoverable downfall of the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin and native token LUNA.

Three Top Terra Attorneys Resign

Three members of Terraform Labs’ legal team have left the company. General counsel Marc Goldich, chief corporate counsel Lawrence Florio, and regulatory counsel Noah Axler all resigned from their positions in May, their LinkedIn profiles show.

This was around the time Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST drifted far away from its dollar peg, bringing its sister token LUNA down with it and erasing more than $40 billion in value in the process.

LUNA currently sits at a price of just over $0.00018 per coin, per data from CoinGecko — a precipitous fall from an all-time high of over $119 one month ago.

“The past week has been challenging for Terraform Labs, and a small number of team members resigned in recent days. The vast majority of team members remain steadfastly committed to carrying out the project’s mission,” a Terraform Labs representative postulated.

The spokesperson also reiterated that Terra is more than the failed UST stablecoin and the company is now focused on implementing a radical plan to save the ecosystem.

While it’s unclear why the in-house lawyers left, there are speculations that the departure could be due to an ethical dilemma defending Terraform Labs or fears the embattled company might not afford to pay for their services. 

Is There Any Hope For Terra?

Terra co-creator Do Kwon has shared a host of proposals aimed at salvaging the network in the wake of LUNA’s steep decline. The latest involved launching a new blockchain that would ditch the UST stablecoin.

The CEO of Binance and the richest man in crypto, Changpeng Zhao, suggested that such a plan was dead on arrival, noting that “forking does not give the new fork any value. That’s wishful thinking.” 

Notably, a handful of Terra validators, including TerraBay, BTC.Secure, StaderLabs, THORchain.BULL, and 01labs have voiced their support for Kwon’s proposal presented on Monday. The wider Terra community, however, is largely opposed to the idea of a chain split.

With the prices taking a gut punch, staking and other activities have all but stopped. Developers are also exiting the Terra ecosystem in droves and moving to other networks. Meanwhile, some LUNA and UST investors are seeking legal action against Do Kwon in South Korea.

Is this the end of the Terra blockchain? Well, the final demise of the network could take some time, but the only direction from here appears to be down — sans a miracle.