'Kwontitative easing' — BTC price hits $43K in UST as Terra empties $2.2B Bitcoin bag

cointelegraph.com:

Bitcoin (BTC) fell below $30,000 for the first time in ten months on May 10 as turmoil at Blockchain protocol Terra continued.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD plumbing lows of $29,731 on Bitstamp.

The first trip under the $30,000 mark since July 2021, overnight BTC price performance came amid both declining stock markets and fresh trouble for Terra's U.S. dollar stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST).

As Cointelegraph continues to report, UST saw an attack involving mass selling this week, which culminated in Terra using its giant 750 million BTC reserves to prop up its USD peg.

Initial liquidity steps to mitigate the impact of the threat proved insufficient, however, and UST subsequently fell to lows of $0.67, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

At the same time, BTC/UST on major exchange Binance began behaving erratically, reaching highs of more than $42,000 while other Bitcoin dollar markets struggled to preserve $30,000.

Which has caused a massive surge in BTCUST (Not Bitcoin valued in dollars, but valued in the UST stablecoin). pic.twitter.com/Xn7qcy4VMZ

Rumors of a full meltdown at Terra spread rapidly on social media. Nonetheless, the firm's vocal co-founder, Do Kwon, remained calm after announcing the mass BTC liquidity injection.

Kwon retweeted a summary of the situation from Jose Macedo, Founding Partner at Delphi Ventures, who argued that Terra's contingency measures would ultimately lead to greater decentralization of the crypto industry's largest decentralized USD stablecoin.

"Haters will criticise this for centralisation and they're right, for now. @LFG_Reserve made $UST more robust, but also temporarily more centralised," he wrote on May 9.

Data from on-chain monitoring resource