Nothing happens overnight. Any crypto enthusiast, unless they have been cut off from the networks for a week, is now aware of the calamity that has befallen the Terra (LUNA) project and its stablecoin UST. The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) possessed more than 80,000 bitcoins (BTC) a few days before the incident, so where did they go? This article contains the answear.
The Luna Foundation Guard was formed for the non-profit goal of creating counterpart reserves (most notably in bitcoins) to preserve the stablecoin TerraUSD (UST). And, evidently, everything was going rather well before the beginning of the apocalypse on May 9, 2022.
Indeed, as shown by a recent tweet from the LFG, the reserves were still made up of 80,394 bitcoins on May 7, or the massive equivalent of about $2.9 billion at the time. Not to mention the tens of millions of dollars in other cryptocurrencies like BNB, AVAX, or the USDT and USDC stablecoins.
More than 99 percent of these BTCs were transferred from the LFG reserves to accounts on two cryptocurrency exchanges, Gemini and Binance, on the first two days of the tragedy (May 9 and 10).
The Luna Foundation tried to establish a monopoly by selling BTC on GEMINI and Binance.
According to an Elliptic investigation, 52,189 BTC were transferred to the Gemini platform as of May 9. Another 28,205 BTC were transferred to Binance around 21 p.m. on May 10.
Following the collapse of the UST peg to the dollar, the Luna Foundation Guard began by selling all of its USDC and USDT stablecoins, before launching a massive liquidation of bitcoins on May 10.
“LFG directly sold 26 million USDT and 23 million USDC for a total of 50,200,071 UST.” She transferred 52,189 BTC to exchange them with a counterparty (Gemini) for a total of 1.5 billion UST.
It didn’t take long for the lethal chain reaction to continue, with the selling of 33,206 BTC. As of Monday, May 16, 2022, there were just 313 BTC remaining in Luna Foundation Guard reserves, which were worth less – $9.4 million – than the 39,914 BNB that were not impacted – around $12 million.
If the LFG had practically no Bitcoin left in its reserves, it thankfully had a considerable quantity of AVAX from the Avalanche project in its reserves. Indeed, the Luna Foundation’s leftover is almost 2 million AVAX and are today worth at 65 million dollars.
In all, about $90 million in crypto-assets would remain in LFG reserves.
