Even though China has banned cryptocurrency trading, its people remain interested in the volatility of the crypto market, not least because many of them have found alternatives and continue to trade all sorts of tokens.
Bitcoin’s price continued to plummet on Monday after a rough weekend, down more than 50% from its peak of $69,000 in November 2021 and nearing the $30,000 mark.
On Monday, Terraform Labs, the organization behind UST, cryptocurrency Luna and Luna Foundation Guard, emptied its treasury wallet of all of its bitcoin, about 42,530 bitcoin, or $1.3 billion. The price of UST dropped to about $0.95.
On the same day, the hashtag #luna went up to the top ten keywords on Weibo, which is China’s equivalent of Twitter used by 570 million people monthly and is widely regarded as a measure for public discussion in the country. On Monday evening, posts hashtagged #luna had generated nearly 15 million views.
“LFG [Luna Foundation Guard] announced lending $1.5 billion to rejuvenate UST, but from my perspective, Luna has seen its day. Even if it’s rescued, it might go on to suffer from Parkinson’s disease, trembling and left half alive. No one would dare get involved following such a trust crisis,” wrote one user with over 200,000 followers on Weibo. Others shared images of their crypto losses incurred by Luna’s crash, when price has dropped more than 50% within 24 hours.
Although it’s hard to measure how many people in China are trading crypto, it is noted that 10% of web traffic goes to OKX, which consistently sits on top of the top 15 exchanges worldwide, comes from China, according to web analytics company SimilarWeb (h/t Wu Blockchain).
