How Terra wiped out over 40 billion dollars in seven days, the cleanest death spiral in crypto history.
In April 2022, LUNA hit an all-time high near 120 dollars. Do Kwon was crowned king of the Lunatics. Terra was the third biggest crypto ecosystem after Bitcoin and Ethereum.
UST was an algorithmic stablecoin. To keep it at 1 dollar, you could always burn 1 UST for 1 dollar of LUNA, or burn 1 dollar of LUNA for 1 UST. No real collateral. Just math and faith.
Anchor Protocol paid a 20 percent yield on UST deposits. 75 percent of all UST in existence sat there. The yield was subsidized and was never sustainable.
On May 7, two large wallets pulled 375 million UST out of Anchor. Someone dumped a massive UST position into the Curve 3pool. UST depegged to 0.98. Panic began.
On May 8, Luna Foundation Guard deployed 1.5 billion dollars in Bitcoin reserves to defend the peg. Do Kwon tweeted, steady lads, deploying more capital. It did not hold.
On May 9, around 5 billion UST got pulled from Anchor in a single day. UST broke again. The death spiral activated. UST holders burned UST, LUNA got minted, LUNA price tanked, more panic, more UST burning.
On May 10, LFG sold the rest of its Bitcoin reserves. Still did not work. LUNA supply started exploding into the billions, then trillions.
On May 11, over 11 billion UST had exited Anchor. LUNA fell under 1 dollar.
On May 12, LUNA crashed 96 percent in a day to under 10 cents. Major exchanges halted trading. Binance paused withdrawals.
On May 13, LUNA was a fraction of a cent. UST sat around 10 cents and never recovered. The chain was later halted.
Around 40 to 50 billion dollars erased from Terra alone. Over 400 billion wiped from the broader crypto market. Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, and Voyager all blew up downstream. Do Kwon was arrested in Montenegro, extradited, and is now sentenced to 15 years.
The lesson is simple. An algorithmic stablecoin backed by its own volatile sister token is a confidence machine. The second confidence breaks, the math runs the other way, and it cannot stop itself.
UST did not fail because it was attacked. It failed because it was always going to.