Terra Classic, UST Witness Massive Spike; Cautious Investors Cast Doubt On Rally's Sustainability

Terra Classic (LUNC) and UST (USTC) have witnessed a sharp spike in their prices this week – a feat that the algorithmic stablecoin and the abandoned crypto asset have not seen since Terraform Labs introduced a new Terra blockchain and native token LUNA.

LUNC and USTC rallied at $0.000092 and $0.035, respectively, in a trading session Monday that saw almost $427.9 million worth of Terra Classic exchanging hands. This means a 57% increase in the price of the classic Terra token and a staggering 253% surge in the value of the classic algorithmic stablecoin.

This feat continued Tuesday with LUNC trading at $0.00008846 and USTC trading at $0.03279. Investors having both crypto assets were delighted by the price surge but were left wondering what could have propelled it.

Most crypto communities considered both Terra Classic and USTC "dead tokens" since developers abandoned the original Terra blockchain in May following the infamous collapse of Terra that wiped out multi-billion investments. Since the blockchain fork, developers no longer use the old Terra blockchain to power decentralized apps (dApps) and other protocols.

So what triggered the price surge? One possible factor is the voluntary burning of LUNC by investors who lost money during the crash. TFL CEO and co-founder Do Kwon previously said that burning would not make any difference.

Investors are hopeful that if they could shrink the circulating supply of the original native token of Terra, they can push its price to spike. However, based on the data, only 434 million LUNC were sent to dead wallets this month, which translates to less than 0.1% of the 6.55 trillion total circulating supply of the asset.

Another possible reason for the uptick is the threat made by hacktivists Anonymous, who said they would bring justice to investors and will make sure Kwon pays for what he has allegedly done with investors' money.

USTC was trading up 265.03% at $0.0828 while LUNC was trading up 49.39% at $0.00013 as of 3:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, according to the latest data from CoinMarketCap.