Terra LUNA’s Price Drops Further Below $0.01 with 15 Billion Additional LUNA Issued

Terra LUNA’s price has dipped further below the $0.01 level, reaching lows of $0.006 at the time of publication. An earlier drop in the UST price to as low as $0.22 caused additional LUNA to be minted and issued on the open market. As reported by crypto journalist Colin Wu, more than 15 billion LUNA were issued today as the total supply has climbed over 18 billion, per Terra Analytics data.

According to Terra Analytics data, more than 15 billion LUNAs were issued today, the total supply has exceeded 18 billion, and the price of LUNA has fallen below $0.02. The current total UST supply is 12 billion. https://t.co/5OTYrjtsBe

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) May 12, 2022

A significant increase in supply put additional selling pressure on LUNA, causing a price decline. At the same time, it helped UST rebound, with the beleaguered stablecoin reaching $0.843 on Coinbase earlier today. At the time of writing, UST was down 44% to $0.42.

According to CoinMarketCap data, LUNA’s price has dropped 99.54% in the past 24 hours alone, trading at $0.006 at the time of publication. That is down from highs of around $88.13 on May 4 when the precipitous price drop began and all-time highs of $119 attained in early April.

LUNA plunged drastically as TerraUSD (UST), Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin that is supposed to be priced 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, lost its parity.

3/ TFL is also initiating three more emergency actions:

1. Proposal to burn the remaining UST in the community pool.
2. TFL will burn the remaining 371 million UST cross-chain on Ethereum.
3. TFL just staked 240 million $LUNA to defend from network governance attacks.

— Terra (UST) ? Powered by LUNA ? (@terra_money) May 12, 2022

The huge slump in the LUNA price pushed it out of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization to rank 318th at the time of publication as market capitalization cascaded to $60 million. To save Terra, TerraForm Labs states that it was initiating three more emergency actions, which include a proposal to burn the remaining UST in the community pool. Terra will burn the remaining 371 million UST cross-chain on Ethereum and stake 240 million LUNA to defend from network governance attacks.

Exchanges move to halt LUNA trading

Amid the drama, several exchanges have moved to halt or temporarily suspend LUNA trading. Binance states on its website: “Due to the existing tick-size constraints of the LUNAUSDT perpetual contracts, Binance Futures will take the following precautionary measures: Should the price of the LUNAUSDT contracts go below 0.005 USDT, Binance shall proceed to delist the contracts. Any further information including the delisting time will be announced accordingly.”

We have ended trading on several $LUNA & $MIR spot trading pairs. We will also be ending support for the LUNA/USDT Futures pair starting May 12 at 12:00 UTC. Please see this article for more information: https://t.co/VNW8GiV4io pic.twitter.com/xpiPdihCYh

— Bitrue (@BitrueOfficial) May 12, 2022

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitrue has also made a move to stop LUNA trading, stating, ”Due to the extreme volatility we will be removing support for the LUNA & MIR coins in several functions. The following spot trading pairs will be removed, LUNA/BTR, LUNA/BTC, LUNA/ADA, LUNA/UST, MIR/XRP, MIR/ADA, and MIR/UST. Trading for these coins has been suspended already and the pairs will be removed at 03:00 UTC on May 13.”