What is the Question?🚨

Beginning in the wee hours of Monday, January 9 (ET), the price of LUNA skyrocketed, from $1.37 to a high of nearly $2 before settling down at roughly $1.60.

Identify some of the major reasons for this recent upshot in price, and back up your assertions with data. Why did the price jump so suddenly on Monday night? Will prices remain at, or above, current marks in the coming weeks or will it return to at or near $1? Why?

Analyzed Topics:

1. Transactions & Users & Spent Fee
2. Transfer Activity
3. Staking Activity
4. Swap Activity
5. $LUNA Price

Introduction🚩

What is Terra?

Terra is an open-source blockchain payment platform for an algorithmic stablecoin, which are cryptocurrencies that automatically track the price of currencies or other assets. The Terra blockchain enables users to instantly spend, save, trade, or exchange Terra stablecoins.

The Terra protocol creates stablecoins designed to consistently track the price of a fiat currency (a government-backed currency such as the U.S. dollar or euro). It consists of two cryptocurrency tokens—Terra and Luna.

More Info

What Happened to $LUNA?

The Luna crypto network collapsed in what's considered the largest crypto crash ever, with an estimated $60 billion wipeout, shaking the global digital currency market. There are two stories regarding Luna crypto: the TerraUSD/UST stablecoin and the actual Luna coin.

More Info

Method⚡

In this dashboard, i investigated Jan 9th activity of Terra ecosystem to find out what was the reason that caused $LUNA’s price pump and what happened actually.

For this purpose i used ==Terra.core== database provided by Flipsidecrypto and used

==“terra.core.fact_transactions”== table for Transactions,

==“terra.core.ez_transfers”== table for Transfer Activity ,

==“terra.core.ez_staking”== table for Staking Activity,

==“terra.core.ez_swaps“== table for Swap activity,

and ==“crosschain.core.fact_hourly_prices”== table for $LUNA Price.

I considered 6 as $LUNA decimal for amounts and only successful transactions with tx_succeeded = TRUE

I analyzed all the data on a hourly basis on Jan 9th 2023.

Findings👀

• In this section, i show an overview of Terra hourly network activity on Jan 9th and compared the overall data from after new year and Jan 9th itself.
• According to the number chart above, a total of 15K out of 267K transactions on Terra happened on Jan 9th by 3K users out of 26.4K. We can conclude from this that over 5% of all Terra transactions after start of 2023 happened on Jan 9th.
• Terra has recorded suspicious activity on 5 PM Jan 9th with a huge pump on the charts like transactions, users and Spent fees. Out of 15K transactions on Jan 9th, 2.5K of it happened on 5 PM while its previous hour i mean 4 PM has recorded less than 1K transactions.
• Most of the transactions which has been recorded on Jan 9th on Terra were transfers followed by swap and delegate.
• Transfer has accounted almost 75% of all Jan 9th transactions.
• Also we can see that swaps had the highest average transaction per hour among other actions on Jan 9th.

2. Transfer Activity

Findings👀

• As it is obvious, most of the transfers on Terra were IBC_Transfer_Off on all charts such as transactions, users and volume.
• Most of the transfer activity of Jan 9th belong to 17:00 with over 2.2K transfers and 7.6M volume in $LUNA and 15M in USD.
• We can see that 10K transfers OFF has been made on Jan 9th by 4.6K receivers and 3.4K senders with a volume of 16M $LUNA and 26.4M USD.
• As i said, Transfer OFF completely outperformed transfer IN on that day.

1. Transactions & Users & Spent Fees

3. Staking Activity

Findings👀

• Same here, there were some suspicious activity on 5PM on Jan 9th like previous sections, which most of them were delegates.
• It is interesting that the highest staking volume was not belong to 5PM, but it belongs to 4AM and 12PM.
• Most of the staking activity like transactions users were belong to Delegates and most of the staking volume were Redelegate on Jan 9th especially 12 and 5 PM.

4. Swap Activity

Findings👀

• Again here we see swap activity recorded a huge spike on 5 PM on Jan 9th and it seems the price pump of $LUNA was because of that. Over 60% of $LUNA swaps were from $LUNA on Jan 9th.
• LUNA/Astroport has recorded the most number of swaps on 5PM followed by Terra Poker Token in the second place based on popularity.
• Also left chart is showing us that most of the net volume of swaps on Jan 9th were belong to 5 and 6 PM with over 550K bought volume and 586K sold volume.

5. $LUNA Price

Findings👀

• In this section, i showed some popular tokens daily price and their changes and compared them to $LUNA since the beginning of 2023.
• Besides SOL, Luna was the second token that its price increased a lot and was the second biggest gainer among popular market tokens.
• As it seems, LUNA increased 40% since Jan 1st and recorded a massive move on Jan 9th and since that day, started to pump slowly.
• $LUNA’s price after completing a turn over after Jan 17th started to rise again.

Conclusion💡

• From what i analyzed, i saw some suspicious movements around 5PM on Jan 9th that caused a huge pump on $LUNA’s price and it was mainly because of $LUNA’s trading activity like swaps, staking and others. But in overall, the whole market bullish was the main reason of $LUNA’s price increase and it was the second biggest gainer after SOL among popular crypto tokens like ETH and BTC.
• All the metrics that i analyzed on Jan 9th such as staking, transfer, swap activity and some more on Jan 9th recorded some serious movements around 5PM.
• Most of the swaps that happened on Jan 9th were from $LUNA to something else and LUNA/Astroport was the most popular swap pair on Jan 9th on Terra network especially around 5 PM.
• the next reason of $LUNA price jump is that US government recently announced the USD inflation rate is 6.5% after it reached to 7.1% last month on December 2022 and because of that when everyone expected to see it increase but instead ot that it decreased, markets went up and experienced a little hype after the new year.

Author: Sbhn_NP

Discord : Sbhn_NP#8717

Twitter : Sbhn_np

Instagram : Sbhn_NP

Special thanks to m.zamani for some inspiration.

Thanks for your time!