Terra’s Luna, Luna Classic Tokens See Volatile Trading Amid New Developments

Tokens related to the Terra ecosystem saw volatile trading in the past 24 hours amid legal developments against issuing company Terraform Labs, data shows.

The prices of luna (LUNA) gained as much as 30% – from $2.65 Thursday to $3.44 Friday morning – then fell steeply even as the broader crypto market remained flat. Luna classic (LUNC) gained as much as 34% before sliding this morning, data from CoinGecko shows.

Such volatility arose amid reports of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigating whether Terraform Labs violated U.S. laws regarding how it marketed its ecosystem tokens.

Futures tracking the two tokens saw nearly $18 million in liquidations while losses on futures of other major cryptos, apart from bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), remained under the $3 million mark.

The LUNA was issued to holders in late May following the depegging from the U.S. dollar of algorithmic stablecoin terraUSD (UST) in early May – a move that saw the value of what had been luna (now rebranded as LUNC) fall as much as 99.7%. Value locked on decentralized finance (DeFi) apps in the Terra ecosystem fell by $28 billion in addition, as reported.

The liquidations marked the highest losses for traders of the new LUNA tokens so far, data shows, with nearly $5 million in losses. However, LUNC futures saw higher losses at over $12 million, suggesting retail traders are continuing to prefer LUNC trading over LUNA.

Crypto firms Bybit and Binance are currently the only exchanges to offer LUNA futures to traders, while OKX and Huobi offer LUNC futures. OKX, popular in Asia, saw over $9 million in liquidations alone, the highest among its counterparts.

LUNA trades over $3.06 at writing time. LUNC trades just over $0.00007647, with gains falling to 7% for traders in the past 24 hours.