Overview

The events that happened in May 2022 in the world of cryptocurrencies were unprecedented in the history of this asset class; More than 40 billion dollars of capital was lost and many small investors from billion dollar funds suffered losses.

LUNA's market value was about 30 billion dollars shortly before the collapse. The consequences of what happened to the Terra network and the LUNA currency were so severe that there have been at least 8 confirmed cases of suicide due to capital loss in the Terra ecosystem.

Creating a stablecoin from almost nothing greatly increases capital efficiency and can bring rapid growth to any ecosystem. Terra's strategy for creating a decentralized stablecoin seemed to be to use the “Growth Hack” to get as big as possible. The main idea of ​​Do Kwon was Anchor, the main protocol of this network and its attractive profit. With the help of attracting stray capital, the rapid growth of the number of Terra network users became possible.

In the first quarter of 2022, with the collapse of the crypto market, Anchor had become a serious problem for Terra. Billions of dollars that could have been put to other uses and used in other platforms and even in the real world were wasted only to make profit in Anchor smart contracts. Such an attractive profit was even a hindrance to other beneficial projects of the Terra ecosystem. The bear market had reduced demand for loans, and Anchor's reserves were dwindling daily at an alarming rate.

In March, proposals to cut profits emerged at Anchor's governance forum. It has been revealed that the proposal approved by the Anchor team was a much steeper cut than what was approved, but that Do Kwon personally vetoed it. This brings us to another major problem with Terra's ecosystem; This network was decentralized in name only. The development teams of many of the "independent" projects in the Terra ecosystem were either directly employed by Terraform Labs or in critical need of its support. To support the Anchor protocol benefit, Terra had to dump LUNA. On the other hand, the issue of buying Bitcoin with the help of selling LUNA was also raised and carried out. To make up for this by "burning Luna", Do Kwon made perhaps his most fatal mistake; Listing UST on centralized exchanges like Binance and FTX created new demand for UST and burning LUNA. By taking the pricing process further and further out of Terra's control, the situation worsened. Another destructive factor was personality cult, halo effect and maximalism of Do Kwon fans and Terra ecosystem. When bigotry takes the place of logic, critics are marginalized and the power of reason is lost. Evidence of criticism of the Terra ecosystem has been available since 2018. Criticisms that Do Kwon has faced harsh criticism many times [1].

All of the events discussed eventually led to the creation of a new network called Terra 2 and its native cryptocurrency called LUNA 2. This network and its cryptocurrency was an attempt to revive the Terra ecosystem and compensate the users who faced irreparable losses [2].

Basically, following the demise of the stablecoin, the Terra Luna ecosystem required a fresh new token to be implemented on the new Terra blockchain. This token, known as Luna 2.0, serves that purpose.

Do Kwon, the founder of TerraForm Labs, proposed an idea that would see a new chain replace the old Terra network. This idea was given the name "the Luna rebirth." In conjunction with this, the previous version of Luna was succeeded by Luna 2.0. It has broken ties to the UST stablecoin, which was one of the factors that contributed to the crash in the first place.

On May 28th, during the genesis block for the new Terra chain, Luna 2.0 was made available to the public. The first block on the new mainnet, which was referred to as Phoenix-1, was produced at the time that was designated as the launch time, which was 6 AM UTC (2 AM ET, 11 PM PT). Terra, who originally planned for this to launch on May 27, has moved this date back one day. On May 27, snapshots for the coin airdropping occurred at Terra Classic block 7790000 [3].

Methodology

The intention of this dashboard is to analyze the evolution of LUNA 2.0 through the different events occurred during his history. For this reason, to be able to make a clear report, I am considering the Terra Core data from Flipside Crypto database. The main metrics to be analyzed are:

• Transactions over time
• Volume over time
• Active users over time
• New users over time
• Average transactions per user over time
• Whales transactions and volume over time
• Whales behavior
• Top 5 whales analysis
• Metrics by label address

The daily transactions and volume over time have had similar trends. Both metrics experimented a downtrend during the first month and stayed regular from July to September. Afterthat, there was an increase on the activity early September but how are decaying from that. In the case of volume, ATH have been detected while for number of transactions, the highest September value was too far from the ATH of the first days after the relaunch.

In the same charts we can see not only the 7-day moving average (MA) metrics, but also the 15-day MA and the 30-day MA. Thanks to that we can assess the trends on these important features of the network. Since the relaunch, a total of 447k transactions have been done while more than 625M have been moved.

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The number of active users also decreased over time but had an spike on September as well. In this case, the spiking daily numbers are so far from the previous highest levels. During the first days, the amount of daily active users stayed above 20k, while with the September spike, the highest value was just above 5k.

However, an interesting thing is the activity of the users on the network. The average transactions per user has increased from the beginning until the date passing from below 2 daily transactions per user to above 12. Then, the active users become more active on the network.

On the other hand, taking a look at the new users coming to the ecosystem, we can see how the activity trend is similar to the active users, the numbers decreased over time but had a minimum spike on September. Again the spike is far from the previous values. Until now, almost 150k users joined the new ecosystem.

Another anecdote I want to highlight is the whales behavior. In this case, we can see how during the first days the major of the volatility was performed. A lot of actions was sells due to the airdrop event.

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Another important activity was carried out during September as well, when again more sells was done than buys by whales.

In general, the transactions and volume made by whales experimented a downtrend during the first days but suddenly spiked on September, where the highest values were achieved in both cases.

At the left we can see the top 5 whales behavior.

In this final charts, we can see the activity splitted by labels. The intention of these charts is to see from to where the transfers comes and goes.

As we can see, the major of the transactions are done using OKX rather than other label. Another important one is FTX.

The same occurres with the active users, the major of them are using these aforementioned platforms.

Regarding the volume, the same is done. Then, OKX and FTX are the most used platforms by LUNA 2.0 users.

Key insights

• The daily transactions and volume over time have had similar trends.  Both experimented a downtrend during the first month and stayed regular from July to September- Then the activity spiked again.

• The number of active users also decreased over time but had an soule on September as well. 

• An interesting thing is the activity of the users on the network. Their transactions per user has increased from the beginning until the date.

• During the first days the major of the volatility was performed by whales. A lot of transactions were sells due to the airdrop event.

• OKX and FTX are the most used platforms by LUNA 2.0 users.

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General metrics

Specific whales analysis

Activity per platform