New LUNA Token Rises, Still Down 65% After Launch, Kraken CEO Defends Listing

cryptonews.com:

The new Terra (LUNA) blockchain went live on Saturday, with the newly airdropped LUNA token seeing extremely volatile trading on its first day, before stabilizing and gaining some ground later in the weekend. Despite having become a controversial project, the new LUNA token can already be traded on a number of large exchanges.

According to Do Kwon, the CEO of Terra development firm Terraform Labs, the new network with the chain ID “Phoenix-1” was launched on May 28 at 06:00 UTC. “Pheonix-1 mainnet is now live and producing blocks - public node services, wallets and explorers should be going live shortly,” the controversial Terra founder wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

Besides the launch announcement, the normally outspoken Terra founder has not said much in public other than retweeting announcements from exchanges on which the new token is being listed.

The first exchange to make the new token available for trading on Saturday was Bybit, which announced that markets were open around 10 minutes after the airdrop. The exchange was followed by Kucoin about an hour later.

On Bybit, the price of the new LUNA token opened at USD 0.5, before rising quickly to reach a peak of USD 30 within the first hour of trading. The price then crashed to a low of USD 3.5, before stabilizing around USD 5.5.

On Kucoin, meanwhile, the price opened at USD 5, before rising to a peak of just over USD 6 on Monday morning in Europe.

As of Monday at 10:25 UTC, LUNA traded at USD 6.20, up several percents in a day and down 65% in two days, per Coingecko.

Price of LUNA on Bybit:

In addition to the two above-mentioned exchanges, the new token was at the time of writing traded on OKX, Huobi Global, Gate.io, Kraken, Bitfinex, and MEXC Global, according to exchange