Terra’s Luna Classic Gains Big as Binance Burns Untold Tokens

The value of Luna Classic, LUNC, is up over 70% for the week and up over 44% for the month, hitting $0.000365 mid Sunday as traders awaited final token burn numbers from Binance. This as most cryptocurrencies saw minimal gains.

As impressive as the relative numbers are, the price is a far cry from its $100 price in April. But the trading activity in the last few days has been enough to vault LUNC into the top ten cryptocurrencies by trading volume, and boosting its market cap to over $2.1 billion, according to CoinGecko. That puts it in the neighborhood of Bitcoin Cash, wavering at the edge of the top 30 coins for the last seven days.

Luna Classic is the token of the now infamous Terra blockchain, which imploded in May and subsequently prompted lawmakers to consider a ban on similar algorithmic stablecoins.

The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, announced on Monday plans to cut the token’s supply. “Binance will implement a burn mechanism to burn all trading fees on LUNC spot and margin trading pairs by sending them to the LUNC burn address,” the exchange wrote.

“Burning” a token means sending it to a cryptocurrency address that isn’t controlled by any user. This effectively removes coins from the circulating supply, which typically accelerates price action.

Within a day following the announcement, LUNC was up over 55%, according to CoinGecko, vaulting from $0.00018 to $0.00031.

The price has held above $0.00026 ever since, with another solid jump arriving with the new month, hitting $0.0003473 as of this writing. Although Binance is expected to publish the results of its burn on Monday, traders are already bullish in their expectations. Crypto Twitter has been counting down with guesses as to the amount of tokens burned, ranging from 10 billion to more than 25 billion.

According to CoinGecko, Binance accounts for nearly 55% of the trading volume for LUNC. The price action has prompted calls on Twitter to Coinbase, Robinhood, Gemini and FTX to list LUNC on their exchanges.

The gains are likely of little comfort to those who lost millions of dollars in the Terra Luna collapse. And while Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon insists that he is not on the run, international law enforcement agency Interpol has issued a "red notice" for his capture. On Wednesday, South Korean officials sought to seize $62 million in Bitcoin said to be linked to Do Kwon and the Terra project.