Terra partnered with COM2US - New Era for the Explosion of Gaming on Terra 

The whole market is in red but we still see “blue” from the “moon”. Terra is among the few ecosystems that still recorded positive growth in the recent downtrend market. How can it be possible? What are the drivers for this impressive growth of Terra? Let’s find out in the Terra Panorama this week!

Terra Ecosystem Overview

Important Updates

A new era for Gaming explosion on Terra 

Do Kwon, the founder of Terra, updated his status about the first step of Terra’s penetration into the dynamic gaming market. In the past few months, we have been seeing the explosion of the NFT sector on Terra with the arrival of countless NFT projects.

However, most Terra NFTs have limited use cases so this sector’s impact on the growth of the whole Terra ecosystem is not obvious. 

However, the boom of a new sector like NFT can be seen as an initial signal for the new direction of development from Terra. And the most recent updates on Gaming have revealed a clearer picture of Terra’s next step. 

From the beginning, Terra is known as the blockchain emphasizing saving and payment services, with Anchor being the core project alongside the support from the rise of many other payment apps: CHAI, Kado, Alice,...

Now, Terra has started a new phase in its development with the arrival of Gaming, NFT, and Metaverse.

With a new direction in Terra’s development, the highest mission of Terra - “mass adoption” of stablecoin, is still emphasized in this new phase. Stablecoin will play a pivotal role in the whole gaming ecosystem. Rewards instead of being paid by each game token separately will be paid in Terra’s stablecoin.

This is expected to create a new big use case and capture tremendous value for Terra’s stablecoin. 

A catalyst for the explosion of this sector on Terra is that Hashed - a VC supporting Terra growth, has announced a new $200M fund focusing on metaverse, blockchain gaming, NFTs, and DeFi. Part of this fund is likely to be invested in Terra, which enables Terra to accelerate the growth of this sector in its ecosystem. 

Hashed supports the development of Prism 

Hashed has been one of the most active and supportive backers of Terra. Many core protocols on Terra are supported by Hashed: Pylon Protocol (Launchpad), Valkyrie (Social), Stader Labs (Staking), Mirror Protocol (Synthetic), and Anchor Protocol (Saving & Lending). We can see that Hashed does not only focus on one specific sector but a wide range of DeFi stacks, which shows a comprehensive and long-term collaboration between Hashed and Terra.

This week, the next protocol that received support from Hashed is Prism, a derivatives protocol that adopts a mechanism to maximize the capital efficiency in Terra. Prism achieves this by splitting a Collateral Token (CT) into Principle Token (PT) and Yield Token (YT). This method allows users to have assets’ liquidity while still being able to enjoy staking rewards. 

This collaboration between Hashed and Prism benefits both parties: 

For Hashed:

• Earn maximized yield from LUNA: Prism allows Hashed to optimize profits with LUNA by splitting LUNA into yLUNA (YT) and pLUNA (PT). This enables Hashed to earn yields from yLUNA while still can leverage capital efficiency with pLUNA. 
• Hashed benefits from the growth of Terra’s ecosystem as a whole: Prism with its innovative refraction mechanism is potential to leverage the capital efficiency of many other protocols on Terra, which of course include lots of protocols that Hashed invested in. Therefore, as a long-term partner, Hashed benefits from the development of the Terra ecosystem as a whole. 

For Prism:

• Boost TVL at launch: In the upcoming Prism V1, LUNA will be the only accepted collateral asset so the participation of a VC with a large holding of LUNA can help the protocol record significant TVL in the first stage. 
• Advisory support: Hashed has many experts in Traditional Finance, who can have many valuable advices for Prism in the early stage of building a comprehensive derivatives product in the DeFi world. 

Other events during the end of November:

Highlight Numbers

While the whole market is recently in red, Terra is the ecosystem that still records positive growth in this hard time of the whole market. 

The TVL of the whole ecosystem has increased by 47.23% to regain its position in the Top 3 blockchain by TVL, after more than 3 months the position being taken by Solana and Avalanche. 

Since Proposal #44 (burn $90M LUNA to mint UST), the UST market cap is still growing dramatically. The market cap of UST ($8,134M) is now significantly close to DAI ($8,99M). This Proposal is still ongoing for nearly one more week so we can expect that the market cap of UST will flip DAI soon. 

When many coins/ tokens saw a substantial decrease, LUNA reached new ATH many times this week. The most updated ATH price of LUNA is at $77.1 on December 5th. 

This growth of Terra when the market is red can be explained by several factors. 

• Firstly, Terra is entering into a new phase of development with Gaming, NFT, and Metaverse, which creates huge expectations for the community. This is believed to be the next big trend on Terra when it is mentioned by Do Kwon and is likely to receive funds from a top-tier VC - Hashed. 
• Secondly, the demand for UST is still pushed dramatically by its cross-chain integration. Many new UST pools have been announced recently on PancakeSwap (BSC), QuickSwap (Polygon), Port Finance (Solana)... with attractive rewards. 
• Lastly, Proposal #44 also has a significant impact on the growth of market cap for UST and also adds value for LUNA by decreasing its supply.

Ecosystem Analysis

DEX

Astroport - which is known as the upgraded version of Terraswap, has announced its “lockdrop” on December 14th and will officially launch after this event. 

The way Astroport designed its “lockdrop” event can be seen as a wise strategy to quickly set up its position in the Terra AMM landscape. 

Firstly, it rewards users for moving liquidity from Terraswap to Astroport. Terraswap up to this date is still the dominant AMM on Terra so most Terra AMM users are concentrated here. By offering rewards for the migration from Terraswap to Astroport, Astroport can break the initial barrier of some conservative users on Terraswap to try a new platform.

In this way, Astroport does not only increase its customer base faster but can also directly gain the market share from Terraswap.

Secondly, the “lockdrop” method is useful in creating loyal customers. Most newborn projects use “liquidity mining” as the fastest way to attract users. But this method generates unsustainable capital as users often leave right after the APY is no longer attractive.

However, with the “lockdrop” method, users are still encouraged to provide liquidity by attractive rewards but will have to “lock” their liquidity for a certain time. It can be seen as a “trial period” for users to experience all features of the new protocol to potentially become its loyal users after having a good experience. 

A quick overview of the DEX landscape on Terra up to this point: Terraswap, Loop Finance, and Astroport are still considered 3 key players in this landscape. TVL of Loop Finance ($7M) until now is still far below that of Terraswap ($1B). Although Terraswap is said to be an outdated AMM compared to new AMMs like Loop Finance or Astroport, the TVL on Terraswap still remains at a high level.

Can this be explained by people’s expectations of a huge airdrop from Terraswap when launching its own token? Is the smart strategy of Astroport enough for it to flip Terraswap? We need to observe more from the launch of Astroport this December to see a clearer picture of the potential change of the AMM landscape. 

Lending

Anchor, the key protocol in the Terra ecosystem, has announced several upgrades of the protocol: 

Launching the new Liquidation Queue Contract: This is enabled by a newly launched protocol Kujira, a protocol that allows retail users to easily access the liquidation market. By opening the liquidation market to the mass, collateral assets can be liquidated much faster to offer a better operation for Anchor in case a bear market occurs. 

Technical improvement for cross-chain integration: Anchor is working on smart contracts for new assets like bSOL, bATOM,.., restructuring EthAnchor to make it a true cross-chain application, easily replicable to other chains such as BSC, Solana, Polygon via Wormhole Bridge’s generic messaging feature. 

Others: Hired new core researchers, created bAsset builder's kit - a document gilding third parties to easily build bAssets on their own without the need for support from Anchor, which helps scale new collateral additions,...

All of that innovation from Anchor will strengthen the fundamental infrastructure of Terra to be ready for a new flow of users or capital when the next big trends occur. 

Gaming

We have mentioned above the signal for a new era of Gaming on Terra, so what has Terra been preparing for this next giant trend in the ecosystem?

Terra has announced its partnership with COM2US, a subsidiary of GAMEVIL, one of the top mobile game publishers with millions of players since 2000, to boost the development of blockchain gaming. So what does this partnership mean?

For Terra:

• It benefits from the expertise of COM2US in game designing. COM2US has a number of global games such as Summoners War, Ace Fishing: Wild Catch, and Golf Star. Notably, Summoners War is the game that already has 100M downloads and global sales of $2B. This is to show the huge scalability that an attractive game can reach. This hit will also be the first game to come to Terra, which is expected to create a significant catalyst for the boom of Terra Gaming. 
• It benefits from the existing game-specialized platform of COM2US - Hive. Hive is a platform that is optimized for global service, which is now serving up to 100M active users annually. 

For GAMEVIL COM2US:

• It benefits from the blockchain technology of Terra. To make Hive into an open platform with maximum scalability, COM2US may need support from Terra. By integrating with Terra blockchain technology, the Hive platform can improve its ease and usability for blockchain game developers. 
• It benefits from the DeFi ecosystem of Terra. One of the most attractive features of the game is its rewards and Terra with its efficient financial system offering appealing token rewards for players. Moreover, in terms of infrastructure, Terra has already built some key NFT Marketplaces, which are ready to facilitate any trading activities arising from gaming. 

Actually, before this partnership, Terra has already had some “play to earn” games. But most of them are still “on paper” without real products yet so this sector did not receive much attention from the community. It was not until some posts from Hashed and Do Kwon about supporting building this sector on Terra appeared that gaming received more attention. 

With the newest update on the above-mentioned partnership, we will see how this can be a trigger for the further explosion of the whole gaming ecosystem on Terra.

Conclusion

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

• Terra is entering a new era with the promising explosion of Gaming.
• Terra is the ecosystem that has recorded positive growth despite the recent downtrend in the market.
• Astropost will launch this December, which can have a significant impact on the AMM landscape on Terra.

If there are any questions, please feel free to comment below for further discussions about Crypto!