Terra Classic

As of May 2022, LUNC’s all-time highest price was $119.02 (when it was still the old LUNA token), recorded in April 2022. The token rallied past $100 from a few dollars in less than a year and became one of the top 10 cryptocurrency by market capitalization as sustained demand for Terra’s stablecoin resulted in a dwindling LUNC supply.

The main trigger for the demand was Anchor, Terra’s yield-generating platform, which offered eye-popping but ultimately unsustainable, annual rewards on UST deposits of up to 20%. As deposits on Anchor blasted through $14 billion in UST in April 2022, the circulating supply of the old LUNA tokens fell below 400 million tokens for the first time ever.

In early May 2022, UST’s price deviated from the $1 peg and investors started to flee from Anchor, which was the main driver for UST’s demand. Steps to recover the peg proved to be short-lived, and UST lost its price peg during the week of May 9, 2022 again, eventually falling to pennies. UST’s collapse and the bank run on Anchor drove the original LUNA into a hyperinflationary cycle and the token’s price fell to cents.