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Analyst Predicts Terra LUNA To Surge By 80-100% Following Key Event

LUNA, the native token of the Terra 2.0 blockchain, was among the many gainers in the past week positively affected by Bitcoin’s impressive rally toward the $35,000 mark.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, LUNA is up by 13.96% in the last seven days, providing some relief for investors who have had to endure the token’s bearish form in the previous weeks leading to this price rise. 

As expected, LUNA’s current bullish form has now attracted much attention, with some analysts speculating there could be more gains in the coming weeks. 

LUNA Could Double Its Value After Breaching Major Trendline, Analyst Says

In a post on X on Sunday, crypto analyst Captain Faibik shared with his 67,000 followers an intriguing bullish prediction on LUNA’s price trajectory.

Faibik, who claimed to not be a LUNA enthusiast, noted that the altcoin has recently broken a major bearish trendline and could potentially gain by 80-100%.

According to Faibik’s analysis, LUNA traded above $0.47 in the past week, breaching a bearish trendline that stretches as far back as January 2023 on the token’s daily chart.

Traditionally, trendlines are used by traders to connect several price points together and provide some insight into the potential direction of an asset’s price movement. 

When an asset’s price moves out of an established trendline, as in the case of LUNA, it can be interpreted as an impending price reversal.

Since the start of 2023, LUNA has produced an overall negative price performance, losing over 63% of its value in the last 10 months. However, if Faibik’s prediction proves true, the popular altcoin could be on its way to a remarkable recovery. 

At the time of writing, LUNA trades at $0.468 with a 0.70% decline in the last day. With an 80-100% price increase, this price could rise as high as $0.934 in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, LUNA’s daily trading volume is currently down by 3.73% and valued at $48.67 million. With a market cap of $263.92 million, LUNA is ranked as the 117th largest cryptocurrency.

Related Reading: Is Terra Classic Planning For USTC To Be Pegged To The Dollar Again?

Terra Community Approves New Proposal 

In other news, the Terra Community has recently passed governance proposal 4790 aimed at the active and aggressive development of the Terra ecosystem with resources provided by Terraform Labs.

Under this newly approved proposal, Terraform Labs, alongside Terra community partners, will explore opportunities to utilize non-LUNA capital in driving the growth of the project’s economy. 

In addition, 125 million LUNA will be staked by a Terra community council to encourage and reward active network engagement, offer essential services to support the ecosystem, and guarantee equitable decentralization.

LUNA

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The Other Side Of The Do Kwon Story: Fat Man Terra Visits Laura Shin

It’s time to listen to the other side. Fat Man Terra used to be a cog in the Terra machine, but nowadays he’s the protocol’s biggest critic. He’s also a researcher, and his investigation lead him to believe that Terra was a scam from the very beginning. Of course, Laura Shin’s Do Kwon interview rubbed Fat Man Terra the wrong way. So, exercising his right to reply, he went to the same platform and told his side of the story.

If what Fat Man Terra says is true, the Terra/ Luna story is a horror film. 

A court will probably decide if he’s right or wrong, though. Let’s explore his allegations, taking into account that this is just the investigator’s interpretation of the facts. He might know more about the Terra/ Luna case than everyone on Earth, though.

This is the introduction to the episode titled “Fat Man Terra Speaks: Do Kwon Is a ‘Sociopath’ and a ‘Charismatic Manipulator”:

“Fat Man Terra, the anonymous Twitter account dedicated to bringing Do Kwon to justice, reacts to my recent interview with Do Kwon and says what he thinks it revealed about his personality.”

This is the video:

Fat Man Terra Presents The Case

  • According to the pseudonymous investigator, the Terra creators were “unfairly enriching themselves” and failed to disclose critical information to investors. On purpose.
  • Regarding his interview with Shin, Fat Man Terra thinks Do Kwon was “dancing around questions” and didn’t answer directly several of them. 
  • He thinks Do Kwon was “intentionally lying” about Terra’s breakup with Chai. Both when it happened and during the interview. At best, the situation was “heavily mishandled.”
  • Fat Man Terra claims that on-chain data shows that TerraForm Labs cashed out billions of dollars. They cashed out throughout Terra’s whole existence.
  • He also thinks there’s proof that the organization has “hundreds of millions stashed away.”
  •  According to the pseudonymous investigator, at the time Terra claimed that the protocol was attacked, but could not find “proof of fraud.”

The investigator also thinks that Do Kwon is “not able to stick to one story.” That’s a characteristic that fraudsters often exhibit. And he claims there’s a reason that regulators all over the world are looking at Terra specifically. Some things don’t add up, and this case is far from over. 

LUNA price chart on Eightcap | Source: LUNA/USD on TradingView.com
Opinions About Do Kwon’s Character

Respectfully, Fat Man Terra goes for the throat. He’s been studying Do Kwon and his diagnosis is that the man is:

  • A “sociopath with little regard for people’s feelings.”
  • “Avoiding law enforcement” and “definitely on the run.”
  • An idiot. Apparently, Do Kwon held all of the company’s bitcoin reserves in a single wallet. 
  • A liar. He knew that his involvement in the failed algorithmic stablecoin Basis Cash was relevant and should have disclosed it. 
  • A thief. Do Kwon was pretending to believe in Terra over everything and promoting it as such to retail. In reality, he was “simultaneously pulling out” hundreds of millions. 

According to Fat Man Terra, it all comes down to that. “If you really believe in UST, why did you cash out so much,” he asks Do Kwon. Also, why did he made up statistics and inflated the network’s numbers? 

The investigator will “start to believe he’s sorry” when Do Kwon starts making affected Terra investors whole from his own pocket. 

Fat Man Terra Is Still Optimistic

The parasites will always be there, surrounding the crypto space. According to Fat Man Terra, if the industry wants to survive we have to start “calling out scammers” and “pushing for justice.” He believes the industry will develop “failsafe mechanisms” to filter out bad actors and, in general, he’s “optimistic about the future of the space.” Make no mistake, though. Despite the optimism, the investigator claims that “Terra was a scam at every level.”

According to Laura Shin, Do Kwon will be back to answer the allegations in the future.

Featured Image: Laura Shin screenshot from the interview | Charts by TradingView

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Laura Shin Asks Terra’s Do Kwon The Tough Questions. What Did We Learn?

This is the Do Kwon interview everyone was waiting for. In the latest episode of Laura Shin’s Unchained Podcast, titled ‘It Was Never Really About Money or Fame or Success’, the Terra creator faces serious scrutiny. Do Kwon denounces media misinformation, denies several serious charges and gives a play-by-play explanation of the organization’s movements during the crash. And he sweats bullets. 

Laura Shin did her homework, and relentlessly puts forward the questions most Terra investors have. She does this in a non-threatening, extremely professional way. Do Kwon answers all of her questions. Some better than others, but the man does show his face and answers, which is a lot. Compassionately, Laura Shin also gives Do Kwon a second opportunity to say sorry to Terra’s affected investors and their families. He would’ve come across much worse if she hadn’t offered that second chance.

The episode’s intro says:

“Do Kwon, cofounder of Terraform Labs, discusses the charges against him, gives a message to Terra victims, answers allegations about potential fraud and non-transparent business practices.”

This is the video:

This Do Kwon interview is one for the books, everybody interested in the subject should watch it. Let’s bring out the bullet points and analyze this phenomenal piece of media.

Do Kwon On His Location And “On The Run” Status

  • He claims he doesn’t live in South Korea anymore and he’s not planning to return to face the alleged charges. He plans to appeal, though.
  • Do Kwon hasn’t seen a copy of the arrest warrant.
  • Apparently, cryptocurrencies are securities in South Korea. 
  • His team has been cooperating with South Korean authorities, fulfilling the court requests for different documents.
  • Do Kwon refuses to reveal his current location because of the difficulties it brings to his living situation. He denies he’s on the run. 
  • He denied frozen funds at the KuCoin and OKX exchanges belong to him, Terraform Labs, or the LFG foundation.

The most important news Do Kwon reveals, though, is that the organization is working with a chain analysis firm to produce a paper on their trading activities. “They should be publishing a report shortly, which I think is going to provide a lot more clarity,” he said. Do Kwon promised the report in “the next couple of weeks.”

LUNA price chart on Kraken | Source: LUNA/USD on TradingView.com
Terra Was a Failure But It Was Not A Scam

  • Do Kwon claims that his online persona was an alter ego and confesses that he got carried away with the “sh*tposting.”
  • Terra’s failure was caused by the protocol’s “weakness to respond to the cruelty of the markets.”
  • He admits to a lot of technical and theoretical mistakes but denies Terra was a scam. 
  • Do Kwon claims that the Anchor developers/ whistleblowers that came forward denouncing the protocol were only interns. Not a line of their code appears in the final product, and this is apparent in GitHub. 
  • Admits to the SDT premine of $1.4B. This was a second stablecoin that the Terra organization used to maintain the UST peg to the dollar. This stablecoin wasn’t even mentioned in the Terra whitepaper. According to Do Kwon, this was because they hadn’t conceived SDT when they wrote it. He claims Terra’s is an “academic whitepaper” and wasn’t supposed to cover all of the technologies’ use cases.
  • Do Kwon admits they were using market operations to maintain the UST peg to the dollar. In fact, he says this was always the idea. The burning and minting of LUNA was not the only procedure that was supposed to maintain the peg.

Do Kwon And The Other Admissions

  • Apparently, Terra and Chai haven’t been working together for a long time.
  • When asked about faking Chai’s numbers and interactions registered in the Terra blockchain, Do Kwon said that the numbers came from Chai. According to him, they were probably “distancing themselves” from the Terra situation but still using the blockchain.
  • When asked about his participation in Basis Cash, a failed algorithmic stablecoin, Do Kwon distanced himself from the situation. He was just founding the team, but had nothing to do with the actual project. “Basis Cash is not something that I designed or operated. It’s something that I encouraged,” Do Kwon said.
  • When asked about if he was planning to compensate Terra investors from his own pocket, Do Kwon said, “my personal funds are not significant enough to make a difference.”
  • He still believes the world needs to work towards a decentralized future and that we need censorship-resistant money. 

As for his future plans, Do Kwon says he plans to continue building “highly experimental” projects in the crypto space.

Featured Image: Do Kwon and Laura Shin, screenshot from the video interview | Charts by TradingView

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LUNA Records 100% Growth In A Single Day. More Upside Coming?

LUNA has been on the decline since the crash of the UST rocked the crypto space earlier this month. What had been one of the most successful cryptocurrencies in the market had quickly turned sour. The digital asset had fallen from trading around the $100 level to trading a couple of zeros below $1, causing holders to lose billions of dollars. Nevertheless, a lot of investors continue to hold out hope and trade the coin, which has led to multiple rallies.

Up 100% In One Day

On Sunday, LUNA had recorded one of its most successful days since the crash. After falling to $0.0001, it had promptly rallied once more as the daily trading volume had ramped up. This saw the digital asset hit as high as $0.0002 before the end of Sunday. The 100% had no doubt sparked more interest from crypto investors that had seen more people move into the digital asset.

Related Reading | Exchange Inflows Rock Bitcoin, Ethereum As Market Struggles To Recover

LUNA’s market cap which had declined significantly last week had begun to pick up on the back of this rally. The market cap which was sitting below $1 billion as of Saturday had regained its position above this level and has now settled above $1.2 billion. 

The volume continues to remain on the high side even with the price now 99.9% lower than where it used to be a few weeks ago. Mainly, the interest in the digital asset has come from the fact that it is now highly volatile. Now, while volatility can be a quick way to lose money, it can also help investors make a lot of money in a short amount of time, hence all of the renewed interest.

LUNA price recovers to $0.0002 | Source: LUNAUSD on TradingView.com

To put this in perspective, if an investor had put $1,000 in LUNA on Saturday, by Sunday evening, they would have made a 100% return on investment. However, it is not always rosy with digital assets such as this, as $1,000 can easily turn into a pile of dust in the same fashion.

More Upside For LUNA?

There are a lot of speculations on what the future of LUNA will be. While the market is still reeling from the crash that saw millionaires lose their status in a matter of days, others have begun to settle into the new normal and have picked up trading on the digital asset.

Related Reading | More Stress For El Salvador As Bitcoin Dips To $29,000

The digital asset continues to skew strongly in the selling territory but recent trading trends have suggested that this might begin to change. Most of last week saw LUNA trading in the red. However, the recovery on Sunday has seen indicators skew to a 72% buy sentiment. If this continues, then the upside for the digital asset may very well continue, maybe driving the price once more towards $0.0005.

Inversely, this could also be a bear trap. A recovery that convinces investors that the digital asset may continue the trend, whereas will trigger sell-offs that will cause the price to dump. If this is so, then LUNA may well add another zero to its price this week.

The cryptocurrency is trading at $0.0001913 at the time of this writing. It is up 13.28% in the last 24 hours with a market cap of $1.25 billion and a total supply of more than 6.9 trillion tokens.

Featured image from Blaze Trends, chart from TradingView.com

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LUNA Supply Nears 7 Trillion, Is $1 Still Possible?

The circulating supply of LUNA has continuously gone up since the UST debacle began. This has mainly been from people redeeming their staked UST for the digital asset, which caused its supply to rise drastically in such a short amount of time. In turn, the price of LUNA had declined to reflect the enormous amount of tokens that were being dumped into the market. Now that the dust has finally begun to settle, the question remains where the price of the asset might end up.

$1 LUNA Still Possible?

Now, it may sound comical to debate whether the price of LUNA would be able to return back to $1 given that less than two weeks ago, the price was sitting above $100. However, this is the case as the digital asset is now about four zeros short of $1 and even that seems a generous value. What is on the minds of investors now is if the price of the digital asset would ever be able to recover in any meaningful way.

Related Reading | TerraLabs Sold Over 80,000 BTC To Rescue Its Stablecoin, Luna

To really assess if LUNA can recover to $1, the first thing to look at is the circulating supply of the digital asset. In less than two weeks, it has grown from a little over 300 million to almost 7 trillion tokens in circulation at the time of this writing. When the supply still remained above 300 million, the price was trending at $100, meaning that its market cap at that time was averaging around $33 billion depending on the price fluctuations.

Presently, the total supply of the digital asset has now grown by more than 1,000,000% to be sitting at a little over 6.9 trillion tokens, according to CoinMarketCap. For LUNA to get to $1, it would mean that the market cap would have to touch $7 trillion, and that is if the current supply stays stable. This is presently impossible given that the whole crypto market cap at its highest was at $3 trillion.

LUNA trending low at $0.00018 | Source: LUNAUSD on TradingView.com

However, for LUNA to get to its previous market cap before the crash, the token would have to be trading at $0.005. Since a $33 billion market cap remains in the realm of possibility, it is safe to say that this is still within reach. 

Related Reading | LUNA Aftermath: Total Crypto Market More Oversold Than Black Thursday

One thing to take into account though is the investor sentiment. So many people have lost hundreds of millions of dollars to the token that faith in it has been depleted. Thus, with any significant rise in price, there are set-offs that rock the token price back down.

This leads to the conclusion of this analysis which is that the price of LUNA could possibly climb back up to $0.005. But with current market conditions, this may not happen in the short-term and is entirely dependent on if the supply stops growing.

Featured image from TheNewsCrypto, chart from TradingView.com

Disclaimer: The following op-ed represents the views of the author, and may not necessarily reflect the views of Bitcoinist. Bitcoinist is an advocate of creative and financial freedom alike.

Follow Best Owie on Twitter for market insights, updates, and the occasional funny tweet… 

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LUNA Aftermath: Total Crypto Market More Oversold Than Black Thursday

Panic struck the crypto market last week when Bitcoin broke below support, stablecoins unpegged from the dollar, and LUNA dropped to zero. The bloody aftermath has left cryptocurrencies as a whole more oversold than the Black Thursday COVID collapse.

Here is a closer look at the historically oversold conditions in crypto.

Total Crypto Market More Oversold Than Black Thursday

It was a bloodbath in Bitcoin, apocalypse in altcoins. Even stablecoins pegged to the price of the almighty dollar were completely shaken. A nefarious actor or group of actors strategically attacked the dollar-peg of the UST stablecoin, causing a domino effect of algorithmically driven liquidation of reserve assets that included BTC.

Related Reading | This Expanding Triangle Pattern Could Be The Last Hope For Bitcoin Bulls

Bitcoin plunged through support and many altcoins reached a total drawdown of 80 to 90% or more. LUNA, an asset tied to UST, fell all the way to zero. Billions were wiped out from the total crypto market cap. If there was ever a time to be doubtful about the future of crypto, it might be now. However, market veterans recommend when things become doubtful, you zoom out.

The weekly RSI is more oversold than on Black Thursday | Source: CRYPTOCAP-TOTAL on TradingView.com

“When in doubt, zoom out,” holds true in this case. Comparing the recent crypto selloff with Black Thursday, the weekly RSI has reached even more extreme oversold levels. Meanwhile, the Black Thursday candle recorded a 50% drawdown, and the latest correction by contrast barely produced 30%.

By definition, a hidden bullish divergence occurs when an asset’s price sets a higher low, yet the indicator sets a lower low. This often indicates continuation ahead.

 

Elliott Wave Theory suggest the cycle isn’t complete  | Source: CRYPTOCAP-TOTAL on TradingView.com
Could Another 45% Collapse Still Be Ahead?

Elliott Wave Theory could provide clues as to what continuation might look like ahead. The total crypto market cap is also trading within a parallel channel, of which it just touched the bottom of. The upper boundary of the channel is roughly $10 trillion USD.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Bear Market Comparison Says It Is Almost Time For Bull Season

While that fact might be the hope bulls need right now, bears still could have the last laugh. The weekly RSI has now reached the lowest level since the bear market bottom and the fourth lowest in its history on TradingView.

Only three other times has the total crypto market cap been more oversold  | Source: CRYPTOCAP-TOTAL on TradingView.com

Of the three previous lows set on the weekly RSI, two were bear market bottoms. The remaining low, however, was followed by another 45% plunge to the final bottom. Another 45% drop from here would take the total crypto market cap back to around $600 billion, or below the January 2018 cycle peak.

Simply put, risk is still extremely high, but as oversold conditions increase, so does the potential for reward. Act accordingly.

Follow @TonySpilotroBTC on Twitter or join the TonyTradesBTC Telegram for exclusive daily market insights and technical analysis education. Please note: Content is educational and should not be considered investment advice.

Featured image from iStockPhoto, Charts from TradingView.com