At the time of writing, the Luna Foundation Guard has purchased $1.3 billion worth of BTC — and the nonprofit intends to increase this to $3 billion in the short term.
The altcoin’s value has surged by close to 50% over the past month, and CoinMarketCap data shows it’s the eighth-biggest cryptocurrency in the rankings.
It comes as excitement builds over efforts to back the UST stablecoin, which is based on Terra’s blockchain, with Bitcoin worth billions of dollars.
What is the UST Stablecoin?
UST is designed to be pegged on a one-to-one basis with the U.S. dollar, but the algorithmic stablecoin is not backed with fiat reserves. It’s hoped that moving to a Bitcoin standard will help the digital asset achieve a greater degree of stability.
LUNA is comfortably the best performer among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap on Wednesday — surging by 10% over the past 24 hours.
Bitcoin, Binance Coin and XRP are largely flat over this timeframe, while Ether has risen by 3.33% as it approaches $3,500.
Do Kwon, the co-founder of the firm behind the Terra blockchain, told Bloomberg News earlier this month:
“The reason why we are particularly interested in Bitcoin is because we believe that it is the strongest digital reserve asset. UST is going to be the first internet native currency that implements the Bitcoin standard as part of its monetary policy.”
LUNA initially launched in the summer of 2019 — and reached an all-time low of $0.12 back in March 2020.
This means that, over the past two years, the altcoin has risen by a whopping 86,000%.
In other developments, Bitcoin briefly topped $48,000 on Monday night — indicating that this price is a crucial level of resistance that stands in the way of further gains for bulls.
Newfound optimism among investors in recent days has helped the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies surge beyond $2 trillion for the first time in over a month.
