Breaking: Binance Suspends LUNA and UST “Spot” Trading Till Further Notice

Binance has made a decision to suspend spot trading for two more trading pairs involving the embattled Terraform assets TerraUSD (UST) and Terra (LUNA) amid increasing rates of decline. In the announcement propagated through the official Binance platform, the global cryptocurrency exchange noted that it would further suspend spot trading for the LUNA/BUSD and UST/BUSD trading pairs due to sharp volatility leading to immense decline.

Binance had earlier suspended margin and spot trading pairs involving UST and LUNA

This comes roughly 8 hours after the exchange announced removal of Margin trading pairs involving Terra (LUNA) which include Cross Margin Pairs such as LUNA/BUSD, LUNA/USDT, LUNA/BTC; and the Isolated Margin Pairs LUNA/BUSD, LUNA/USDT, LUNA/BTC, LUNA/ETH, and LUNA/UST.

Binance announced that it would “remove and cease trading, close users’ positions, conduct an automatic settlement and cancel all pending orders” on the above-mentioned margin pairs. The same approach was carried out on Terra USD (UST) margin pairs.

In addition to this, Binance also indicated that it would remove all Terra (LUNA) trading pairs on the spot market besides LUNA/BUSD whose tick size was updated from 0.00001 to 0.0000001 to accommodate the steep decline the asset has faced in the past three days and protect users.

Terra and Luna crisis escalates

Despite measures promised by founder and CEO Do Kwon and the Terra development team via Twitter, the Terra and Luna crisis increases as Terra (LUNA) dips to $0.000038 as at press time.

The Terra development team had to suspend the Terra blockchain and halt block production at block 7607789 for about two hours on Thursday to avoid any hacks in the midst of the crisis and “come up with a plan to reconstitute it”. Block production resumed shortly after.

In order to stabilize TerraUSD (UST), the development team came up with a burning mechanism which in turn saw a large amount of LUNA tokens pump into circulation as UST holders attempt to cash out their coins via LUNA, increasing the circulating supply of LUNA from just about 346 million five days back to 6.5 trillion tokens at press time.

CEO Do Kwon and the Terra team have noted that plans are underway to resolve the ongoing crisis but whether or not the assets will recover from this unprecedented downturn looks to be seen. UST currently trades at 0.16 against the dollar.