Terra Ecosystem (LUNA) – Entering a new phase

Learn about the Terra ecosystem (LUNA) through the pieces and projects inside, from which to project and find investment opportunities with the system.

Terra is one of the rare Blockchains that doesn’t follow trends like AMM, Lending, meme coins, etc. So many brothers almost do not know, or do not pay attention to the existence of this interesting Blockchain.

So what is Terra’s direction, and will it be successful? You know the answer through the information of this article.

Terra Ecosystem Overview

Terra is a Blockchain created by Terraform Labs, a company in Korea, supported by Terra Alliance. Founded in 2018 by Daniel Shin and Do Kwon, Terraform Labs is a company with extensive background in eCommerce and finance.

If you do not know, Terra is a Blockchain using Cosmos’ CosmWasm technology. Cosmos universe also has many other Blockchains such as: Thorchain, Bandchain, Secret Network, …

Launched in April 2019, Terra mainnet introduced TerraKRW (KRWT), a stablecoin pegged to the Korean Won. KRT is used across a variety of applications to settle payments.

Token Terra

Terra’s main token is LUNA and stablecoins, the most popular currently is UST. Here is some basic information about LUNA and UST updated on 6/12/2021:

LUNA Token:

• Marketcap: $24B
• FDV: $63B
• Rank: 10
• ATH Price: $77.73 (December 5, 2021)
• ATL Price: $0.12 (August 13, 2020)
• Circulating Supply: 384,916,190 LUNA.
• Sàn list LUNA: Binance, Okex, Huobi, Kucoin,…

UST is Algorithmic Stablecoin, adjusted by LUNA, currently has a Market Cap of about $8.2B, is in the top 5 Stablecoins with the highest market capitalization. The image below is the outstanding growth of UST after seven days from Proposal #44 burning a large amount of LUNA to get UST deposited into the Community Pool.

Number of Dapps on Terra

Currently, Terra has about 150 projects if only DeFi is counted (Figure 1). In addition, the NFT/Gaming ecosystem on Terra is also very developed (Figure 2-3).

Terra’s Backer

Terra is a small ecosystem in Cosmos, but not so that the big hands are underestimated. Typically, there are more than 20 investors who have trusted Terra from the very beginning, prominent among them are Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs,…

Investors of Terra

Highlights of Terra ecosystem

Terra’s aim is not to compete with other Blockchains, but to give users a practical application of cryptocurrency.

If you are in Korea, you will probably know about Chai – a popular payment application built on Terra. With a beautiful interface and simple experience, nothing more than a regular application, more than 2 million users have been convinced by Chai, and the number is increasing.

In addition to Chai, there are many other projects in the payment segment that are also serving ordinary users in sending savings and paying subscriptions easily with UST.

The above characteristics are very difficult to see in many Blockchains today, when these ecosystems are always racing to follow Yield Farming, or a series of clones of large projects have mushroomed in the booming DeFi scene.

Current Situation and Roadmap

October 3, 2020: The project has released the Columbus 4 update, with the most important update probably allowing users to write Smart contracts themselves and upload them to Terra Blockchain to increase decentralization and transparency.

2021: In early 2021, Terra launched Anchor Protocol, a fixed-interest Lending project. This can be said to be a huge step forward for the ecosystem, when Anchor Protocol is not only the first Lending piece, but also a place for many other projects to cooperate to bring about unchanged profits.

DeFi Connected Hackathon – Terra’s hackathon was successfully organized, bringing to the community a lot of potential projects such as Orion Money, Apollo DAO,…

Source: Terrians

September 30, 2021 is quite an important date, when Terra’s next update is released, which is Columbus -5.

Columbus-5  Update

October 4, 2021 recorded Terra’s TVL figure officially hitting the $10B mark.

Some outstanding KOLs

Here are a few Twitter nicks with lots of interesting information in Terra, you can follow:

• Dokwon – Founder Terra
• Archon
• Sihyeok – Research ở Terraform Labs
• Terrians
• Midas
• Terra Bites – specializes in Terra . Podcasts

Pieces of the Terra ecosystem

The Terra ecosystem is not too big, but Terra’s strength is that its resources are focused on the main direction, which is the Payment array. So how are the other pieces developing, please read the details below.

Stablecoin

Stablecoin is the first product of Terra, which is and will continue to grow in this ecosystem. Currently, in addition to UST, there are many other stablecoins pegged according to the domestic currency of each country such as KRT (Korea), MNT (Mongolia),…

Terra’s stablecoin is fixed at $1 due to the increase and decrease in supply and demand of LUNA.

After Proposal #44 was released, Terra burned more than 88M LUNA to use UST to develop the ecosystem. This made UST’s Market Cap grow rapidly in just a few days.

Payment

Payments is a growing area in Terra. Most projects operate according to a structure, which is to encourage users to use UST, to submit to the application. The application will then put this amount into the Anchor Protocol to receive interest.

This profit will be used to perform various activities such as paying fees, shopping, charity, … or even farming IDO tokens like how Pylon Protocol works.

Some typical projects in this puzzle include: Chai, Memepay, Pylon Protocol, Subbera, Spaar,…

Lending

Perhaps without controversy, when affirming Anchor Protocol is a Lending monument in Terra, when Anchor Protocol itself is the launching pad for many of the aforementioned Payment projects.

However, Anchor Protocol is not a project specializing in Lending, but personally, the project is favored by many people because of its feature of providing a fixed interest rate, regardless of the market.

Next, Mars Protocol, although it has appeared in front of the community for a long time, is still just a litepaper, nothing more. But the project has promised to launch after Columbus-5.

Synthetic

If in Ethereum, we have Synthetix holding the top-tier position in the composite asset puzzle, then Mirror Protocol is Terra’s representative.

Source: Terrians

There was a time in May when Mirror Protocol’s TVL exceeded $2B, helping the project get close to the top 10 TVLs compiled by defillama.com. And that’s just all that Mirror Protocol can achieve. From May to December 2021, TVL did not increase but also decreased to about $1B

IDO Platform

Pylon Protocol and StarTerra are two representative names in the IDO Platform array on Terra. Although at the end of 2021, two new names will be released, Atlo and FanSquad, but in reality, these two projects are still nothing.

Source: Terrians

Charity

A completely unfamiliar area in Blockchain, but is tending to develop very well when in the Terra ecosystem. The most prominent is probably Angel Protocol, an excellent project in the top 5 winners of the DeFi Connected Hackathon that I mentioned at the beginning of the article.

The development of the Charity segment does not lie in how many projects are born, but in the number of projects with the desire to contribute revenue to charity. And that’s how Terra Charity Alliance – Terra’s charitable alliance was born.

Up to now, there have been many projects that have agreed to give a part of the profits to Angel Protocol to charity.

In addition, a lot of anonymous users have contributed to the fund without being named, typically $300k UST has been sent to Angel Protocol recently.

Betting

In the middle of 2021, there are many Betting projects born. There are times when I think it will be the upcoming trend on Terra. But by the end of 2021, projects have no new updates, even some Twitter can’t find out.

NFT

NFT was picked up on Terra around August 2021, and officially exploded from about October 2021 until now. Projects about purely NFT are appearing more and more innumerable.

In addition, Gaming is also one of Terra’s upcoming strategic areas, when Do Kwon spoke about a lot of “terrible” games that will land in the upcoming Terra.

Other areas

Here are a few other interesting Terra projects:

• Learn Terra: Terra’s “Encyclopedia”. You can learn about the basics at the project website.
• Ozone: The insurance project, has not been launched yet, but Do Kwon seems to be very enthusiastic about Ozone when he made a proposal to use Treasury money to build the project.

Along with that, there are many Dashboards such as UniWhale, Coinhall, … providing data about LUNA.

Projecting the future of Terra’s ecosystem

From the beginning of the year to now, Terra can be divided into two extremes:

• Anchor-oriented UST application.
• NFT/Gaming.

In phase one, it can be seen that UST is being used very well in Anchor, shown in the continuous increase of Anchor’s TVL. But at some point, Terra needed a new catalyst to be able to dramatically increase the need for UST. And that’s where the NFT came in.

NFT here has a very potential segment, which is Gaming. The field of Gaming on Terra promises to be an interesting area in the future, as well as being able to make UST “moon”.

Do Kwon spoke out about the fact that there will be a lot of hot games joining the upcoming Terra. Opening is Summoner’s War (50M+ download on Android). Therefore, Terra could very well be used as a means of payment. This will help UST expand the customer base more than simply depositing savings on Anchor.

Investment opportunity in Terra ecosystem

Invest in tokens

Buying and selling tokens is probably the easiest way to make a profit, so which projects are good to invest in? Personally, I think, only LUNA, ANC (Anchor Protocol) and MIR (Mirror Protocol) are the 3 current names you can consider.

But investing in tokens at the moment is not a good way in my opinion, because most projects already have FDVs from $500 – 3B. Therefore, to find a project with high profit (500 – 1,000%) is really difficult.

Join IDO

Currently, on Terra, there are two IDO platforms, Pylon Protocol and StarTerra, with different ways of playing. While StarTerra still keeps the traditional way, which is to buy tokens and Stake to get allocation, Pylon Protocol promotes farming from UST.

However, almost all projects choose IDO over Pylon Protocol, or organize their own lockdrop (lock UST to farm out project tokens) like Mars Protocol. This action shows that projects also have the goal of pushing up UST demand.

With this approach, LUNA is still the most beneficial asset. But in return, brothers with low capital have a hard time accessing, because the number of USTs will be proportional to the tokens they can farm.

Although StarTerra owns the traditional gameplay, with the FDV STT being close to $600M, the peak swing is completely possible if you buy STT to participate in IDO.

Join Farming, Staking

Currently, only Anchor Protocol is suitable for you to deposit money to earn a stable income. With APY ~20%, this is quite high compared to the interest rate offered by traditional banks.

In addition, Staking can be applied to LUNA with an APY of about 15%. The special thing is that Stake LUNA will have the opportunity to receive Airdrops of nearly 20 new projects on Terra.

Conclude

Terra has now almost developed through a new phase, which is not focusing much on Payment anymore, but focusing on DeFi trends like in other ecosystems. Typically, attracting a lot of NFT projects, among which there are a few names that work on games.

But whatever the stage, the ultimate goal is for the UST to become “mass adoption”. What do you guys think about Terra ecosystem? You can comment below to share your thoughts and discuss with Idolmeta.net!