Do Kwon Continues Cashing out of Terra While Investors Remain Hopeful

On-chain records suggest that Terraform Labs CEO and co-founder Do Kwon has been cashing out Terra (LUNA) to a Binance wallet while shilling the new coin on Twitter.

According to assistant professor Jaewoo Cho of Hansung University’s On-chain Data Lab, Kwon allegedly sent 523,390 Terra(LUNA) to address terra1mdtes94sv3mtdqwj7zwxunmntc6u7778kus033 before the funds were transferred to Binance.

Kwon’s transfer activities were first revealed by cryptocurrency and finance researcher FatManTerra, who has been updating the Twitter community on developments following the crash of the TerraUSD stablecoin in May 2022. FatManTerra initially brought attention to Cho’s findings regarding Kwon’s alleged funds’ transfers.

According to Cho, terra1mdtes94sv3mtdqwj7zwxunmntc6u7778kus033 also sent 19,506 Anchor Protocol tokens to ETH address 0x6420a0AD226bfb6ce5eA3021d3D60D86694B6601 before the wrapped ANC was then transferred to Korean crypto exchange Coinone. If Coinone can identify the owner of terra1mdtes94sv3mtdqwj7zwxunmntc6u7778kus033, Cho says, then they can identify the recipient of Kwon’s LUNA 2.0 transfers.

These findings have come to light even as the TFL CEO has been actively promoting developments on the Terra 2.0 blockchain since it launched on May 27, 2022. Initially, Kwon boasted about the exchanges that would list the new Terra (LUNA) coin and then provided continuous updates to various projects occurring on the new blockchain to assure the community that development on the new blockchain was proceeding at a brisk pace. Some projects included Phoenix, the blockchain’s first decentralized exchange, Soil Protocol, an NFT infrastructure layer for the blockchain, and Luna Name Service, a domain name service similar in principle to Ethereum Name Service and Unstoppable Domains.

But FatManTerra isn’t buying Kwon’s marketing pitch, pointing out similarities to Kwon’s past methods that were used to garner support for the original TerraUSD stablecoin, propelling it into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

The Twitter pundit called for the Korean government to freeze the Binance accounts where Kwon allegedly sent a stash of Terra (LUNA).

Following the collapse of the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin and its sister coin Terra (LUNA), Kwon proposed that the associated Terra blockchain be forked. This proposal would keep the original coins on the old blockchain, rebranded as TerraClassic(USTC) and Terra (LUNC), and launch two new coins, TerraUSD (UST) and Terra (LUNA), on a new chain.

Once worth $1, LUNC is now worth a fraction of a penny. Still, its community is not discouraged.

The coin faces stiff headwinds in reaching that goal, however. The arbitrage algorithm between TerraUSD (UST) and Terra (LUNA) that helped UST keep its peg minted at least six trillion LUNA during the crash in May. To put that figure into context, the market capitalization of all crypto assets is currently under $1 trillion.

But there is hope on the horizon. Binance recently implemented a mechanism to burn all LUNC fees from LUNC spot and margin trading pairs every Monday. At press time, the exchange had burned under $1 million for the week before Oct. 10, 2022.

The LUNC community has also called on KuCoin and Coinbase to introduce similar burn mechanisms.

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