Luna Foundation Guard Acquires $1.5B in Bitcoin to Reinforce Stablecoin Reserves
The purchase brings LFG's holdings to more than 80,000 bitcoins, or nearly $3 billion.
May 5, 2022 at 4:40 p.m. UTCUpdated May 11, 2023 at 5:41 p.m. UTC
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Luna Foundation Guard acquires $1.5 billion in bitcoin. (Javardh/Unsplash)
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The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) has acquired 37,863 bitcoins as it continues to move toward its target of having $10 billion of stablecoin reserves before the end of the third quarter.
- The purchases were made in the form of two over-the-counter deals, one a $1 billion swap of US Terra (UST) for bitcoin (BTC) with crypto prime broker Genesis Global Trading and the other a $500 million purchase of bitcoin from hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, according to a tweet on Thursday. Genesis is owned by Digital Currency Group, which is also CoinDesk's parent company.
- LFG's total bitcoin holdings now stand at 80,394, worth just shy of $3 billion at press time. UST is the 10th-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $18.4 billion, according to CoinGecko.
- “For the first time, you’re starting to see a pegged currency that is attempting to observe the Bitcoin standard,” said Do Kwon, co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, which is the development team behind the terra token. “It’s making a strong directional bet that keeping a lot of those foreign reserves in the form of a digital native currency is going to be a winning recipe.”
- Luna, the governance token of the Terra blockchain, was down by 4.8% on Thursday amid a market-wide sell-off that knocked $1.3 billion off its market cap. Bitcoin is lower as well, making LFG's $1.5 billion purchase now worth $1.4 billion.
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Oliver Knight is a CoinDesk reporter based between London and Lisbon. He does not own any crypto.