Terra is a digital DeFi institution. It was launched in 2018 by a South Korean company called Terraform Labs. Daniel Shin and Do Kwon created the Terra project to revolutionize the payments system. And to maintain the new network’s work in 2019, they’ve created LUNA – Terra’s native token, which has now been renamed to LUNC.
Terra is a fully digital, decentralized financial institution. Its main function used to be focused on its algorithmic stablecoins, which were backed by the old LUNA token. Before the crash in 2022, a special algorithm used LUNC (formerly known as LUNA) to regulate the price of Terra’s stablecoins: if the UST price went up higher than $1, LUNC tokens were used to issue more UST and reduce the cost and vice versa. If the UST price dropped down – excessive UST was switched into LUNC to raise it again. However, in May 2022 UST's value was unpegged from the US dollar, allegedly due to several large withdrawals from Anchor. Both UST and LUNC plummeted in price one after another. The creator of Terra, Do Kwon, has decided to introduce a new Terra chain, Terra 2.0, as a revival plan after the crash, assigning its token the ticker of the "original" chain.
On May, 2022 LUNA was forked into a new blockchain called Terra 2.0, the original chain is still functional and now known as Terra Classic.