How Early LUNA Holders, Founders Made Off With $6B

The Terra (LUNA) crash will go down in crypto history as one of its most catastrophic events. Billions of people lost their life savings and investments. In the meantime, a small group of insiders benefited. Related Reading | LUNA Classic Jumps 90% Following Support From Crypto Exchanges According to a report from Arcane Research analyst Anders Helseth, the Terra (LUNA) ecosystem, now known as Terra Classic, operated as a long-term “pump and dump” scheme. The analyst looked into on-chain activity to support his claims and found revealing information on the distribution of LUNC and its value inflows, how the token supply moved from one group of addresses to another, from exchange platforms from 2020 to a few days before the crash. The analyst called the Terra Classic ecosystem the “perfect exit liquidity” for early LUNA holders. This scheme was supported by the high popularity in the Anchor Protocol, the UST (Terra Classic’s algorithmic stablecoin) and LUNA mint mechanism, and this token’s supply. As seen below, the LUNA supply was “highly concentrated” by Terraform Labs (TFL), Terra Classic’s developing company co-founded by Do-Kwon. Excluding exchange platforms, TFL controlled over 537 million LUNA tokens as of October 3, 2020. The analyst claims unidentified wallets founded by Terraform Labs, the largest LUNC holder, moved their funds to “bridges and centralized exchanges”. The funds began moving in late 2020 and “frequ...