UST has been establishing itself as an emerging leader in stablecoins, solidifying the token in the third-place position behind USDT and USDC, and the leader in decentralized stablecoins.
A new report from Delphi Digital demonstrates that some of the latest news and developments in the Terra ecosystem are leading to substantial growth in UST adoption – including the new Mars Protocol and Terra’s new ‘LFG’ formation.
UST And The Latest Catalysts
A quick briefing: UST is Terra Luna’s native stablecoin, a decentralized algorithmic stablecoin that has been emerging throughout the past year. With the minting of new UST, a dollar equivalent of LUNA is burned. Recent weeks have brought substantial growth to UST supply, spurred by a number of new tools available in the Terra ecosystem, and accordingly LUNA burning has increased substantially as well.
Delphi cites two major drivers: the creation of the Luna Foundation Guard (or LFG) and a new lockdrop from emerging Terra tool Mars Protocol. The lockdrop will, of course, lead to more locked UST, and the formation of the Luna Foundation Guard resulted in a $450M Luna burn mechanic.
UST growth continues and Luna burning has increased this month. | Chart provided by Delphi Digital.
According to routine bot tool @USTmarketcap, the current market cap of UST has surpassed $12B this month and is rapidly approaching $13B. And according to Delphi, UST growth is up nearly 10% over the past two weeks – leading to a burn of nearly 12M LUNA tokens over that time.
$UST Market Cap is $12,266,407,705
— UST MarketCap (@USTmarketcap) February 22, 2022
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Despite the notable market turbulence present to start 2022, Luna has been a strong performer relative to many other top tokens. | Source: LUNA-USD on TradingView.com
There Is More Than Meets The Eye
There’s more happening the Terra ecosystem to spur the stablecoin’s growth lately, too: Terra holders recently approved a new sports sponsorship proposal for Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals, and more platforms have been entering the ecosystem lately as Terra looks to build on it’s flagship Anchor Protocol product.
For example, one barrier to entry to the Terra ecosystem has been accessibility and onboarding. US-based users have historically had to jump through quite a few hoops in order to allocate their UST holdings in Anchor Protocol, and now new tools are making the process much easier – such as the Kado Ramp, which allows users to easily and cost-effectively onboard UST into their Terra wallets, courtesy of Kado’s banking partner Prime Trust. Prime Trust is a well-established banking partner that has worked with major platforms, like Binance. While Kado isn’t an end-all, be-all that provides global solutions, it is undoubtedly a fresh new option for select users that have previously had a much more ‘tooth pulling’ experience thus far.
Need more case studies? Look no further than today’s announcement from the Luna Foundation Guard, which shared a new $1B private token purchase of BTC to establish a decentralized UST Forex reserve.
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Featured image from Pexels, Charts from TradingView.com
The writer of this content is not associated or affiliated with any of the parties mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.