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Anatomy of a Stablecoin's failure: the Terra-Luna case

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  • Antonio Briola
  • David Vidal-Tom'as
  • Yuanrong Wang
  • Tomaso Aste

Abstract

We quantitatively describe the main events that led to the Terra project's failure in May 2022. We first review, in a systematic way, news from heterogeneous social media sources; we discuss the fragility of the Terra project and its vicious dependence on the Anchor protocol. We hence identify the crash's trigger events, analysing hourly and transaction data for Bitcoin, Luna, and TerraUSD. Finally, using state-of-the-art techniques from network science, we study the evolution of dependency structures for 61 highly capitalised cryptocurrencies during the down-market and we also highlight the absence of herding behaviour analysing cross-sectional absolute deviation of returns.

Suggested Citation

  • Antonio Briola & David Vidal-Tom'as & Yuanrong Wang & Tomaso Aste, 2022. "Anatomy of a Stablecoin's failure: the Terra-Luna case," Papers 2207.13914, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2022.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2207.13914
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Będowska-Sójka, Barbara & Kliber, Agata, 2022. "Can cryptocurrencies hedge oil price fluctuations? A pandemic perspective," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    2. Vidal-Tomás, David, 2023. "The illusion of the metaverse and meta-economy," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    3. Lennart Ante & Ingo Fiedler & Jan Marius Willruth & Fred Steinmetz, 2023. "A Systematic Literature Review of Empirical Research on Stablecoins," FinTech, MDPI, vol. 2(1), pages 1-14, January.
    4. Lennart Ante & Aman Saggu, 2024. "Time-Varying Bidirectional Causal Relationships between Transaction Fees and Economic Activity of Subsystems Utilizing the Ethereum Blockchain Network," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 17(1), pages 1-28, January.
    5. Kliber, Agata, 2022. "Looking for a safe haven against American stocks during COVID-19 pandemic," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    6. Gadzinski, Gregory & Castello, Alessio & Mazzorana, Florie, 2023. "Stablecoins: Does design affect stability?," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 53(C).

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