Terra Executes Second LUNA Airdrop

On 2 September, through its Twitter page, Terra announced that its community had voted to pass a second LUNA airdrop proposal. The proposal would see more than 19.5M new LUNA sent to wallets that did not receive the correct number of the tokens during the project’s first airdrop on 28 May.

According to the announcement, the claim interface went live on 4 September and users had until 4 October to claim the new tokens. Unclaimed ones would be sent back to the community pool.

The first LUNA airdrop took place to compensate LUNA and TerraUSD Stablecoin holders after they became worthless in May.

TerraUSD, once considered the largest Algo stablecoin lost its 1 to 1 peg to the US dollar on 9 May. The company sold its Bitcoin reserves to try and save the algorithmic stablecoin, but ended up affecting the native token, dropping its price by 99%.

UST redemption efforts affected the entire crypto market. Bitcoin dropped to $27,000 and wiped out nearly $400billion of the total cryptocurrency market value in May alone.

The new tokens are to be distributed according to a two-year vesting schedule.

Wallets holding less than 10,000 LUNC or AUST before the UST de-pegging from the US dollar will be subject to a two-year vesting schedule. The vesting schedule is intended to avoid liquidity instability, according to Terra.

Issues

Both the first and second LUNA airdrop moves had distribution problems. Several users went on Twitter in May complaining about getting fewer tokens. Ashwsbreal, for example, on 29 May, 2022, tweeted, “Lost $300k in LUNA. Got an airdrop of $59. Thank you Do Kwon and team".

The concerns were noticed by Terra, as the platform on 30 May tweeted that some users had received fewer tokens than they expected and that they were working on a solution.

Several UST holders complained about their token distribution on social media after the second batch of the new tokens dropped.

A Twitter user named Joshcantcode1 posted, "Still hilarious that I had $3,500 UST and will never see it again! Thank you, Terra, for looking out for the community".

Network hard fork

After UST crashed, Do Kwon proposed the creation of a new chain. Kwon is the founder and CEO of the platform. 66% of the project’s community agreed with the proposal, which led to the launch of LUNA 2.0, which has no connection to the UST stablecoin.

The new tokens had a great start. They entered the market on 28 May worth $4.94, and by 31 May, they were worth $10.72. They would, however, take a negative turn and drop to trading between $2 and $1 most of the months. As of writing, each of the coins is worth $2.74, according to Coinmarketcap.

The coins are currently ranked the 99th largest cryptocurrency with a live market cap of $347,374,415. 127,475,474 of them are in public circulation.