On 28 May 2022, Terra 2.0,a new form of the blockchain and the once-powerful LUNA cryptocurrency, was launched. The new form of LUNA, which sees its original version rebranded as terra classic (LUNC), was airdropped to people. A new LUNA token has been launched, in the wake of the collapse of the previous version, now called LUNC. So how do you get hold of it? This article aims to show you how do I claim airdrop from Luna and who is eligible for Luna airdrop.
LUNA airdrop: What you need to know
When the terraUSD stablecoin became depegged in May 2022, its associated LUNA cryptocurrency collapsed, threatening to send the entire market down with it as it dropped from $80 to barely $0.0002. The Luna Foundation Guard, led by Do Kwon, had to come up with a plan to turn things around.
Perhaps the most important thing to note about the new LUNA is how it is distributed. The idea is, ultimately, to compensate people who held the original version of the coin before it crashed in May 2022. With the new terra coin being, hopefully, worth more than what is now known as Terra Classic, then if people have the new crypto, with all the rights and privileges that come with it, that should make up for losing massive amounts of money, according to the Luna Foundation Guard. The calculations for how the new crypto would be distributed was as follows:
First, 30%, or 30 million, LUNA would be put aside in a community pool, with 10% earmarked for developers who, it was hoped, would use the Terra 2.0 blockchain to transfer over decentralised applications (DApps) from the original Terra system.
Then, there would be 35%, or 35 million LUNA dropped to people who had held the original coin, with a further 10% going to people who had UST held in the Anchor Protocol before the crash happened.
Incidentally, the Luna Foundation Guard insist on referring to what happened to TerraUST, which caused the original LUNA to collapse, as an “attack”. However, since there is basically no evidence to suggest that what happened was not a perhaps inevitable risk inherent in the concept of a non-backed, algorithmic stablecoin but instead an attack by malicious players intent on bringing the whole ecosystem down, we shall keep referring to it as the crash.
LUNA airdrop: Who gets what
This rate of compensation only applies to certain holders. One of the biggest fears for any cryptocurrency, let alone one with as troubled an origin story as the new version of LUNA, is that the cryptocurrency’s biggest holders, the so-called whales, will sell off their holdings, thus causing the price to drop. Therefore, as a way of stopping major crypto players having too much of an impact on the new crypto, certain measures have been put in place. For instance, if someone were to have more than 10,000 LUNA before the crash, then they would have to wait for a year to get hold of their coins. Even for people with fewer than 10,000, they still have to wait before getting their full allocation.
Out of the percentage earmarked for the LUNA airdrop, 30% was given out at launch, with the remaining 70% held back over two years. Meanwhile, for people who held UST in Anchor Protocol, there is a limit of compensation which is equivalent to 500,000 UST before the crash. As far as people who obtained their LUNA and UST post-crash, there is no limit to how much they held: everything is done via the same release rate, with 30% at launch and the rest after two years.
LUNA
While there was a method to bar people who held large quantities of pre-crash LUNA from selling the new form of the coin and causing its price to drop, that did not mean that the price did not drop. On 28 May, the day that the new version of LUNA came into being,the crypto reached a high of $19.54 before plummeting to a low of $3.63 later that day. The drop, representing a loss of more than 80%,, was, it has been argued, caused by people who were either ambivalent towards LUNA in the first place or else were sceptical that Do Kwon and his team could make the new coin and Terra 2.0 work.
How to get LUNA now
So how do you get your hands on the reborn LUNA coin if you were not eligible for the airdrop? Like most cryptocurrencies, LUNA can be bought, sold and traded on cryptocurrency exchanges. That said, this early in the new coin’s lifetime there are not as many exchanges trading the coin at the time of writing (31 May 2022) as there might be in the future. At present, the most notable exchanges to list LUNA are Binance, OKX, Bybit, MEXC, and BingX. There is also another option. Decentralised exchanges (DEXes) may also be a place where LUNA is available, because, at least in theory, any coin or token can be bought, sold, and traded can be found on them. However, it may be that no one wants to offer their LUNA on a DEX when you look for it and, perhaps just as importantly, DEXes can be pretty complicated and may not be suitable for beginners.
Final thoughts
Before we finish, a few words of warning. The original version of LUNA, what is now called LUNC or terra classic, collapsed in May as the UST (now USTC) stablecoin became depegged. We are, at the time of writing, less than a month from that crypto catastrophe. We do not know if LUNA, run by the same people who used to run what are now LUNC and USTC, can be a success. We do not know if former big holders will not want to get rid of their LUNA as soon as they possibly can, and we do not know if all the former DApps that operated on the original Terra blockchain will migrate on to Terra 2.0.
In short, there are a lot of things that we do not know yet so, as is all too often the case with crypto, you will need to be careful. Make sure you do your own research, never invest more money than you can afford to lose, and remember that prices can go down as well as up.
Hope this article can help you find the answer to "how do I claim airdrop from Luna and who is eligible for Luna airdrop".
