The price of the new Terra chain’s native token LUNA rose in the market on Tuesday, as the major exchange Binance airdropped it to users and listed it for trading earlier in the morning.
At the time of writing (09:37 UTC), LUNA traded at USD 8.54, up a massive 43.1% in the past 24 hours.
The gains came as, on Monday morning in Europe, Binance announced that it had airdropped the new LUNA token to holders of Terra Classic (LUNC) and TerraClassicUSD (USTC) – the new names for the tokens on the original Terra chain.
The airdrop followed an announcement from Binance published last Saturday, which said that the exchange will list the new LUNA token in its so-called Innovation Zone for trading against the stablecoins tether (USDT) and binance USD (BUSD).
The Innovation Zone is a dedicated area on Binance for trading in tokens that may have more volatility and higher risk than other tokens.
The gains on Tuesday came despite comments from several popular members of the crypto community who claimed that they would “dump” the new token as soon as they received it.
“Zero plans to buy LUNA 2.0, but I will dump any airdrop if I get something on Binance,” Lark Davis, a popular crypto investor and educator, wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
Similarly, another Twitter user argued that Binance’s airdrop is the biggest release of LUNA tokens on any exchange so far, and that it “will move the market.”
The user further argued that many Binance traders will “dump” their LUNA tokens when they receive them. In particular, this is true for users who had UST staked on Anchor Protocol (ANC) because these users “never owned old LUNA and don’t care about new LUNA,” he wrote.
The new LUNA token, which was airdropped to the users affected by the collapse of the old Terra chain, is now available for trading on a number of major exchanges in addition to Binance. Among them is OKX, Huobi Global, Kraken, Bitfinex, and others.
After rising to a high of USD 30 within its first hour of trading on Saturday on Kucoin – the first exchange to list LUNA – the token crashed down to stabilize just under USD 6 on Sunday. Since then, LUNA has consistently traded higher, reaching a high of USD 10.74 on Monday at 21:00 UTC.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the old coins, terra luna classic (LUNC) is down nearly 20% in a day, 28% in a week, and 100% in a month. TerraClassicUSD (USTC) is up 10% in a day, down 52% in a week, and down 97% in a month. The former is currently on the 76th spot per market capitalization, and the latter is on the 147th.
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Learn more:
– New LUNA Token Rises, Still Down 65% After Launch, Kraken CEO Defends Listing
– New Terra Blockchain Goes Live
– Terra’s New Chain Launch Pushed to Saturday, NFT Projects Get an Invite to Move to Polygon
– Terra Moves Closer to New Chain Launch, Secures Exchange Support
– Terra’s Mirror Protocol Survival in Question as Exploit Continues and Devs are ‘Completely MIA’
– Police Reportedly Looking into Allegations that a Terraform Staffer ‘Embezzled’ Funds
