Terra Blockchain Switched Off Again As Heightened Inflation Present Attack Risks

For the second time in less than 24 hours, devs announced on Friday, that the Terra blockchain was officially halted at a block height of 7607789 “to come up with a plan to reconstitute it.”

This comes bearly 5 hours after Terra halted the blockchain at block 7603700 on Thursday to ward off risks associated with poorly delegated blockchains, following Luna’s collapse to almost zero.

“Terra validators have decided to halt the Terra chain to prevent governance attacks following severe LUNA inflation and a significantly reduced cost of attacks” Terra had Tweeted Thursday.

Validators are node operators who each store a copy of the blockchain and must perform certain functions to keep the system secure. They help keep the blockchain as decentralized as possible by preventing the chain from being controlled by one very wealthy entity, thus the more they are, the better.

About one and a half hours later after Thursday’s announcement, Terra stated that “validators are applying a patch to disable further delegations and they will coordinate to restart the network in a few minutes.” Later, the Terra blockchain announced that it had resumed block production, although staking was still disabled under a new code merge. That was not long-lived as the blockchain got halted hours later.

The developments come in the wake of USTs de-pegging earlier this week that sent LUNA plummeting nearly 100%. Consequently,  the circulating supply of LUNA increased by over 1.8 billion on May 11 setting a new record for a single day additional issuance and about 2.37 times the previous total, according to Terra Analytics data. In the past 8 days, that supply has gone from 725M to 6.9T.

LUNA is currently trading at $0.000038 per unit after losing the $0.01 floor before Thursday’s close, according to CoinMarketCap. This presents a 99.98% price drop in the past 24 hours and a 100% plunge from its all-time high of $119.18.

Prior to the shutdown, Binance had warned that it will delist Terra’s LUNA if its price falls below $0.005. Binance has now removed all trading pairs for Terra’s LUNA and UST. The crypto exchange has previously been forced to halt LUNA withdrawals “due to a high volume of pending withdrawal transactions.”

In an earlier tweet on Thursday, Terraform Labs laid out a series of steps they plan on taking to salvage the Terra ecosystem. That, will however not be an easy feat, it seems.