Luna Foundation Guard Discloses Usage of Bitcoin Reserves

The Luna Foundation Guard, the entity in charge of safeguarding the peg of UST, the stablecoin of the Terra ecosystem, has revealed how it used the available Bitcoin reserve before the recent debacle involving the Terra ecosystem. The organization sold part of the bitcoins owned directly, while another part was traded on different dates to try and stabilize the value of UST. The reserve was comprised of more than 80,000 BTC.

Luna Foundation Guard Clarifies Reserve Movements

The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), the organization tasked with safeguarding the dollar peg of UST, the algorithmic stablecoin of the Terra ecosystem, has broken its silence to explain the use of the assets it had under its custody. The institution had amassed more than 80K BTC, which was to be used in case of market imbalances affecting the value of terrausd (UST).

According to reports on social media, the foundation spent almost all of its BTC reserves in a failed attempt to save UST. This was made in three different operations. In the first one, LFG sold 26,281,671 USDT & 23,555,590 USDC for an aggregate of 50,200,071 UST, in what was the first defensive transaction against the depeg incident.

Also, the LFG stated it:

Transferred 52,189 BTC to trade with a counterparty, net of an excess of 5,313 BTC that they have returned, for an aggregate of 1,515,689,462 $UST.

However, the company did not identify the counterparty involved in this transaction.

Last Measures

Even with the intervention of the LFG, the peg was not restored. LFG declares that Terraform Labs exchanged the last of the BTC reserve on May 10, when UST’s market price had touched $0.75. This transaction involved the sale of 33,206 BTC for an aggregate of 1,164,018,521 UST.

The Luna reserve is now comprised of only 313 BTC, meaning that most of the BTC owned by the organization were deployed in the defense effort. Other cryptocurrencies in the reserve, including 39,914 BNB and 1,973,554 AVAX were not used and still are in the possession of the organization. However, there is no clear answer as to how these will be used in the future.

The statements from LFG help to clarify how the Terra depeg incident happened, and how these funds were used. An analysis of the transactions conducted earlier by Elliptic, a blockchain analytics and compliance company, found that the majority of the funds were sent to two exchanges: Binance and Gemini. However, the company declared that it was “not possible to trace the assets further or identify whether they were sold to support the UST price.”