Terra flipped BSC, UST flipped DAI. What's next for Terra?  

Terra Ecosystem important updates

Terra flipped BSC in TVL

This week we saw dramatic growth in the TVL of Terra. If in the first half of this month, Terra was still trying to regain its 3rd position from Avalanche/ Solana, this week TVL of Terra soared tremendously by 35.37% to surpass BSC and became the 2nd largest blockchain after Ethereum.

What is the reason behind this incredible growth?

Statistically, the TVL figure was recorded by DeFi Llama. This week, DeFi Llama has added 2 protocols: Astroport and Stader Labs for the TVL calculation of Terra.

• Stader Labs (~$500M in TVL) is a staking protocol with optimal staking strategies. 
• Astroport (~$1B in TVL) is the next generation AMM on Terra.

Both protocols are among the primary building blocks of Terra. Therefore adding Stader Labs and Astroport to the tracking list of Terra has contributed substantially to the surge of the Terra TVL. 

However, we should note that there is double counting in the calculation of Terra TVL.

This is because Astroport executed the “vampire attack” strategy, which had been applied by Sushiswap to gain the shares of TVL from Uniswap. Astroport did the same thing with Terraswap, it incentivized users to deposit Terraswap LP token into the Astroport platform. Therefore, TVL is counted twice for Astroport and Terraswap. 

Nevertheless, even if we minus the additional $1B resulting from double counting, the TVL of Terra is still higher than BSC and stands still at the 2nd place. This shows the increase in TVL of Terra does not only come from the calculation methodology but mainly from the intrinsic development of the ecosystem.

This development will be seen more clearly when we look closer at each DeFi stack on Terra in the “Ecosystem Analysis” part. 

CHAI - UST payment app, raised $45M in series B,  co-led by SoftBank Ventures Asia

The mission of Terra since birth is the mass adoption of its stablecoins, and it seems that this goal is closer than ever. CHAI - Terra’s payment app successfully raised $45M in series B, co-led by SoftBank Ventures Asia. 

CHAI was founded in 2019 and had been playing a critical role in accelerating the adoption of Terra stablecoins in real life. The payment process with CHAI is so straightforward that its users are even unaware that they are harnessing the power of blockchain. 

Since its launch, the app has been growing at a fast pace. CHAI now records $6B in transactions, connecting 2,000+ merchants with 2.5M+ users with over 30 payment methods.  

With the fresh fund from SoftBank Ventures Asia to penetrate the SEA market, CHAI is believed to be an essential catalyst for the increasing demand of UST in the upcoming year. 

The demand for UST is greater than ever with the advancement of various apps creating more applications for UST in real life. Kado, Alice, Travala,... just to name a few, accept UST as the payment method for P2P payment, shopping, and booking. 

When UST becomes more powerful it will positively affect the whole ecosystem of Terra, appreciating the LUNA price and boosting the growth of Dapps on the Terra blockchain.

Find out more about how UST’s expansion can affect LUNA and the Terra ecosystem right here.

Other events during the end of December

Terra Highlight Numbers

LUNA reached a new ATH at $100 before 2022. This must be an important milestone for all LUNAtics before New Year’s eve. 

Since November, LUNA has relentlessly broken new ATH even when the whole market was in “red”. As long as UST still has demand, LUNA will continue to appreciate. The unique pegging mechanism of Terra has created a unified ecosystem where the growth of any legos in Terra will support the development of the whole ecosystem. 

Read more: How UST works?

UST officially flipped DAI to become the 4th largest stablecoin by market cap. Proposal #44: burn LUNA to mint UST has contributed substantially to this impressive growth.

At first, many people doubted the stability of algorithmic stablecoins, but UST has proved its reliability as an innovative decentralized stablecoin. In the condition that centralized stablecoins like USDT and USDC are facing many issues with regulators, UST as a decentralized stablecoin is expected to strengthen its position in the DeFi world further. 

Terra Ecosystem Analysis

Stablecoins

The multichain expansion of UST is happening at such a fascinating pace, boosting the adoption of UST across many ecosystems. This December, UST has arrived at 3 more chains: Injective, Near and Aurora. 

Terra is part of the Cosmos universe, so it benefits from easy integration with any chains inside the Cosmos universe through the IBC bridge. After Osmosis, Secret, Injective is the next destination for UST in the Cosmos universe. 

On Injective, LUNAtics can now trade LUNA and UST spot/ perpetual. This integration is an important milestone for UST as it will soon become the quoted currency on Injective. At the moment, the quoted currency on Injective is USDT, despite its liquidity, USDT is a centralized stablecoin so it bears custodial and regulatory risks. Therefore, UST as a decentralized stablecoins will be the perfect replacement for USDT. 

Other than Injective, UST is now available on Near and Aurora through the partnership between Terra and 2 leading protocols on Aurora: NearPad and Rose. 

With this fast pace of cross-chain integration, the future that UST completely replaces centralized stablecoins like USDT and USDC will not be so far.

In case of Injective, UST has already been replacing USDT while on other chains like Near, Aurora, UST will gradually penetrate into the ecosystem to take the position of existing stablecoin like USDT and USDC.

What’s more for UST? To further increase the hype for UST, Binance announced that it will list UST. Being listed on one of the largest CEXs will dramatically increase the liquidity for UST, creating the ease of using UST to boost the demand for this stablecoin.

DEX

We can say that Astroport is among the most successful newly launched projects on Terra. Before its official launch, Astroport has already created hype in the LUNAtic community as the next generation DEX on Terra. 

With the lockdrop strategy, Astroport has reached $1B in TVL after just a week. This impressive growth has made Astroport surpass Loop Finance and even many other key protocols on Terra like Mirror, Pylon to become the 4th largest project by TVL on Terra. 

This success can be partly attributed to the “vampire attack” strategy of Astroport. In the first “lockup” phase of Astroport, the project rewarded users for migrating LP tokens from Terraswap to Astroport. The graph below shows the increasing share of Astroport TVL in the total Terraswap TVL since the launch of the lockdrop event on 14th December. 

Once all of this TVL is properly migrated to Astroport, it will become the largest AMM on Terra, surpassing the long-standing leader in this DeFi stack - Terraswap. 

Lending

Anchor as the core protocol on Terra has also recorded an impressive growth rate in the last week and surpassed $10B in TVL.

Since its launch, Anchor has been playing a critical role in the whole ecosystem with its outstanding feature of offering a stable saving rate of ~20% regardless of the market condition. 

For risk-averse investors, 20% is a “sweet” saving rate for stable assets, which is higher than the interest rate offered by any traditional bank.

This unique feature of Anchor is leveraged by many other projects. For example, Pylon can offer riskless IDO thanks to a stable saving rate of Anchor or payment apps like Alice, which can offer users appealing saving rates from Anchor just by depositing UST into the app. 

With the hype of Terra at the end of 2021 and a huge amount of expectation for this ecosystem, Anchor is expected to continue thriving tremendously as more investors pay attention to Terra and create more applications to make use of the stable saving rate of Anchor.

Conclusion

To sum up, here are some highlights of the Terra ecosystem recently:

• Terra surpassed BSC to become the 2nd largest chain by TVL.
• UST market cap flipped DAI.
• LUNA reached a new ATH of $100 before 2022.

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