A friendly reminder $LUNA is a long-term investment. Col-5 laid the groundwork for a lot of upgrades, but none of the important new features are up yet. I expected a bigger speculative pump after the upgrade, I guess we have to wait a bit longer.

Luna is different, the pumps are mainly caused by UST demand. Demand drives up the UST price above 1$, after arbitragers buy Luna and burn it to mint UST. Whenever this happens there's a mechanical price increase for Luna, followed by a FOMO market move. The key is to be in Luna before UST gets minted and take a % of the profits when we take the top after FOMO stage, because there's still a correction after every pump so far.

We've been outperformed by $BTC and others in the short term. But if you look at the 1 month charts we're still up 20% while BTC is down 2%. Not to mention the 3 month (523%), 6 month (102%) and YTD (5762%) charts. Most coins are now consolidating and on the way to retest previous levels. Luna consolidated earlier. So we might see another speculative, chart based pump.

So what's next? First of all we're waiting for IBC connection ( $ATOM and $DOT) and Wormhole from the $SOL blockchain.

Wormhole announced their $ETH - $SOL bridge has done well. Locking in 200mil$+ since the implementation 2 weeks ago. They also announced Terra integration will be next, giving the 250+ Defi apps options to work with UST, Luna and mAssets from $MIR. Driving up demand for all, over time, as integration takes place.

The connection for IBC will give acces to $ATOM's internet of blockchains. Cosmos is still lacking a prominent stablecoin and it's very likely UST will be candidate n°1 to fill that position. Now that Col-5 is deemed stable, there is a governance proposal in the making and Luna stakers will vote for this soon to give everything the green light.

Other than that we keep our eyes on new project release dates and developments on the older ones.

The massive burn we witnessed was to bootstrap Ozone, the blockchain insurance protocol for UST related financial services. The Luna that was burned came from the community pool. Ozone will go live in +-3 weeks.

Before Col-5, when UST was minted only a % of Luna used in the process was burned and the rest went to the community pool for new projects. Since Col-5 all Luna will be burnt, 1$ UST minted = 1$ Luna burnt. Meaning bigger pumps as before.

$LUNA supply on Binance keeps dropping, currently at 25.3mil. For as long as I have been monitoring it, this is an all time low.

(wallet address: https://finder.terra.money/columbus-5/address/terra15s66unmdcpknuxxldd7fsr44skme966tdckq8c)

Valkyrie token (VKR) launched on TerraSwap and was airdropped to Luna stakers. (Incentivised DeFi referrals)

Nexus token (PSI) launched on TerraSwap and was airdropped to Anchor stakers. Nexus builds on Anchor and automates the borrowing process. Users can maxime their yield by letting Nexus change the % of the collateral ($LUNA $ETH, $SOL coming soon and more later) against which they borrow. This will increase UST demand as borrowing becomes more efficient. Nexus will monitor the market automatically and prevents your collateral from being liquidated if the market drops fast (by paying back a part of the UST loan gradually as the price drops). Luna was manipulated by whales a few times to trigger liquidations on Anchor so they could buy up the cheap liquidated Luna tokens after, causing steep price drops and high volatility. Once Nexus is running 100% and it's integrated among Anchor borrowers, this kind of manipulation is no longer possible. Borrowing on Anchor will become safer and generate more income for Anchor savers (making their target APY of 20% on UST savings more solid).

IBC (linking to $ATOM cluster) is coming soonish. The first test transaction has already been made a few days ago.

A few other new projects have been announced, I won't get into them deeper since they're still a long way off. You can check the posts on Twitter if you want to do some exploring. (https://twitter.com/terra_money)

On the charts, it looked like we might have another double top pattern on the 48h timeframe at 38.7$. But Luna already pushed past it. We bounced back up from the ascending trendline drawn since late August and hit a double bottom at 35.3$ish. Chart-based (swing) traders will see this as a bullish sign. It's likely we will explore the top range again after last week's correction.

That's about it for now.

Nothing interesting going on really.

$BTC is pushing towards 57.5k (21 Feb ATH), best case scenario for us will be if it takes a week or longer to claim this level as support and stay relatively flat.

Meanhile $LUNA price is correcting further while the supply on Binance keeps dropping. We saw a major whale withdraw about 500.000 Luna over the weekend. The supply on Binance is sitting at a 2 month low at this point (27.5mil atm, 2 weeks ago it was at 33mil), while traders who only look at the charts are getting bearish. This week looks like a good spot for a supply squeeze/short squeeze before IBC goes live. But you never know. Either way, if the price is low when UST floods into other chains, the Luna burning ratio will be higher. Resulting in a bigger pump later on.

When you take into account the tokeneconomics, upcoming projects and TVL, Luna is still extremely undervalued.

$LUNA is being withdrawn from exchanges so fast Binance can't keep up. Supply keeps dropping steadily while all transactions are being processed.

$LUNA update:

IBC government proposal went live (just a formality). Should be about 10 days now before we plug in to $ATOM.

Wormhole bridge to $SOL could launch anytime, we weren't given an exact timeframe, but it will be here as soon as de developers are done I guess.

Binance has just resumed trading, deposits and withdrawals to the Terra blockchain are enabled again. Supply is dropping (fast).

https://finder.terra.money/columbus-5/address/terra15s66unmdcpknuxxldd7fsr44skme966tdckq8c

Monthly users on Anchor have doubled since June. 100.000 $ETH (636mil$ TVL) has been bonded to borrow UST against. All-round TVL on Anchor is 5bil$ now.

7 NFT minting events took place in the last week. Galactic Punks sold out in 8 mins.

Kado launched the beta version of it's giftshop/webshop. Basically Amazon but all payments are processed through the Terra Blockchain, using UST.

Valkyrie protocol has launched it's token. Stakers on Pylon Protocol can buy these for UST or anyone can deposit UST into the Pylon Pools to farm VKR. Most projects launching on Terra will start off similar like this. Locking in UST in pools for periods of 6-12-18 months.

Valkyrie will incentivise referrals with rewards and aims to bring in more users to DeFi.

https://medium.com/@valkyrie-protocol/valkyrie-protocol-activating-dapps-to-power-cascading-referral-networks-af96d8b8745e

53mil+ UST has been minted in the last week, burning 110.000+ Luna in the process. These are just small numbers compared with what's to come.

TVL (7days ago) / Market cap (today):

Ethereum : 130.2bil$ / $ETH : 428bil$

Binance : 16.7bil$ / $BNB : 73.5bil$

Solana : 10.1bil$ / $SOL : 47.8bil$

Terra : 8.6bil$ / $LUNA : 18.7bil$

Avalanche: 4.2bil$ / $AVAX : 14.1bil$

Ofcourse shortterm there can be some volatily, $BTC dominance is gearing up as well. But as you can see the overall sentiment is very bullish.