How Terra’s collapse will impact future stablecoin regulations

The collapse of the Terra ecosystem, which subsequently depegged its algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) value and crashed it to an all-time low of $0.30, has cast doubt over the future of not just algorithmic stablecoins but all stablecoins in general.

UST’s success and stability were intertwined with its sibling, LUNA, which creates arbitrage opportunities that, in theory, should keep UST’s price steady. If UST’s price drops below $1, it can be burned in exchange for LUNA, which lowers the supply of UST and raises its price.

Conversely, if UST’s price goes above a dollar, LUNA can be burned in exchange for UST, which increases the supply of UST and decreases its price. As long as conditions are normal and everything functions correctly, this creates both a mechanism and incentive for keeping the price of UST at $1.

Though algorithmic stablecoins are not usually backed by assets such as other stablecoins, the organization responsible for developing UST and the broader Terra ecosystem, the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), has nevertheless built a war chest of Bitcoin (BTC) to be used in the event that the UST becomes depegged from the United States dollar.

The idea is that if UST’s price ever drops significantly, the BTC can be loaned out to traders who’ll use it to buy UST and push the price back up, repegging it to the dollar. So, when UST went into a deep dive, LFG deployed more than $1.3 billion dollars worth of BTC (42,000 coins at a price of $31,000 each) to traders who were going to use it to purchase UST, creating demand pressure and bolstering its price. However, that couldn’t save the collapsing ecosystem either, and the spiral effect eventually collapsed the price of the LUNA token as well as its stablecoin.

In the aftermath of the collapse, even centralized stablecoins, such as Tether’s USDT, lost their dollar peg, falling to a low of $0.95. Since stablecoins act as a bridge for various decentralized finance ecosystems, the Terra crash led…