Terra CEO Do Kwon recently hinted at buying $3 billion in bitcoin to enhance the protocol’s reserves, and according to many reports and blockchain analysis, Terra bought $125 million in bitcoin on March 21. The following day, bitcoin’s fiat value soared to a high of $43,079 per unit, prompting a flurry of speculation about Terra’s alleged bitcoin purchase.
Two days ago, when asked why the project was eyeing BTC reserves, Terra founder Do Kwon said:
“Bitcoin is the only hard reserve asset that’s been proven out of the digital currencies… It is very difficult for somebody in crypto to question bitcoin.”
Lark Davis, a digital currency advocate, tweeted shortly after the report that the Terra (LUNA) project had made its first purchase. “Luna makes its first purchase of bitcoin worth 125 million dollars,” Davis added. At the time of writing, the crypto influencer’s message had been shared over 450 times and had close to 4K likes on Twitter.
On Tuesday, the claimed $125 million in BTC transaction has been trending a great lot on social media. While there has been no official confirmation of Terra’s bitcoin (BTC) purchase, a Gnosis safe address allegedly controlled by Terra purportedly transferred $125 million in USDT to Binance.
The same day, Dan Held, Bitcoin advocate and director of Kraken, welcomed the Terra community:
“I welcome all projects and protocols that want to build on Bitcoin/use Bitcoin. Excited to see what [Do Kwon] and the Terra community will do.”
Do Kwon responded with “Looking forward to building together.”
Muneeb Ali, the co-founder of Stacks, an open-source smart contract platform for Bitcoin, also responded to Held’s tweets, saying:
“This is the way. [The] Bitcoin community was welcoming to developers pre-2016. We can do the same now. Developers can use Bitcoin however they want, it only makes BTC stronger.”
Over the previous 12 months, both terra (LUNA) and the network’s stablecoin UST have seen tremendous growth. LUNA has gained 323 percent versus the US dollar this year, and the stablecoin UST is the fourth-largest USD stablecoin in terms of market capitalization, with $15.6 billion.
On Tuesday, Adam Back, the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, questioned Do Kwon about the billions of dollars. Terra’s founder responded by informing Blockstream’s CEO that the company has $3 billion in assets in “funds ready to seed this reserve,” but he added that “technical infrastructure (bridges etc) is still not ready yet.”