LUNA Reboot Plummets Over 70% Just Hours After Debut

Terraform Labs early Saturday launched a new version of the Terra blockchain, “Terra 2.0,” with freshly minted LUNA tokens.

Roughly 12 hours later, LUNA (labeled LUNA2 on some exchanges) had shed almost 73% of its initial value, trading as of this writing for $5.18, according to data compiled by CoinMarketCap. It peaked earlier at $19.54.

LUNA tokens became available for trading at the bybit cryptocurrency exchange about 10 minutes after launch, and about an hour later, Kucoin also announced it was enabling LUNA trading.

Currently, LUNA is traded across seven different exchanges—Bybit, Kucoin, Kraken, MEXC, OKK, Bitrue, and BingX—according to CoinMarketCap. None of the exchanges have enabled LUNA futures trading.

Terra CEO Do Kwon was mostly quiet on Twitter today other than retweeting announcements from exchanges.

“Credibility is the ultimate currency,” tweeted Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao shortly after Terra 2.0 debuted. (Binance was among those offering support for Terra’s new blockchain, however.)

Many people still appear skeptical about Terra 2.0. Crypto YouTuber Ben Armstrong flat out said: “Don’t buy LUNA ever again.”

Other Twitter users said they were sticking by the original LUNA, since renamed Terra Classic (LUNC) and referred to by some as LUNA Classic, which is down 29% over the past 24 hours to $0.00009031, according to CoinMarketCap. LUNC peaked last month at $119.18 before a historic crash that wiped out tens of billions of dollars in value.

Out of 1 billion new LUNA tokens, only 21 million were airdropped on Saturday and added to the circulating supply, according to CoinMarketCap. The rest of the tokens will be airdropped in phases.