While the dust settles from the Terra ecosystem crash and the community decides on next steps, the CEO of a validator runner in South Korea thinks the old Terra chain should be shut down permanently.
Jiyun Kim, CEO of blockchain solutions company DSRV, wrote an opinion piece on his own behalf, detailing how the Terra team tiptoed around the idea of ceasing block production amid LUNA prices crashing and stablecoin Terra USD (UST) has been depegged. He is now urging validators in the Terra ecosystem to reject a hard fork in favor of a brand new community-driven blockchain.
DSRV runs a validation node on Terra with 9.36% of on-chain vote power. DSRV has suffered as much as any investor because its node had raised 14 billion LUNA worth about $1 billion in LUNA by May 8, which is worth about $3 million now.
Kim wrote that the decision to stop the chain on May 12 was not taken lightly by the Terra Validator League, which was renamed the Terra Rebirth League. However, he said the Terra team failed to give the proper notification with the word “confirm” to actually confirm with all the investigators that they should stop the chain, causing him to feel “betrayed”. . He wrote:
“And the announcement they made [made it sound like] the chain restart was originally the opinion of the validator. YES, they didn’t use the term “Acknowledge.”
Terra founder Do Kwon proposed to relaunch the chain and reset the token supply to 1 billion LUNA on May 13th. Kim seems to completely disagree with Kwon when he wrote in his post that reusing the Terra chain “brings the internal value of the Terra chain to 0 completely.”
“The previous Terra chain should disappear permanently. And a whole new chain that should be driven by the community [be made to] Save the madmen.”
There might be more to the story, as Kim wrote in his post, that control of the Validator League has been ceded to the community, giving an appearance of decentralization that could potentially protect the Terra team from further legal encroachments. He wondered if the project is preparing to deal with upcoming legal hurdles by asking “Maybe this can be used to mitigate legal risk?”.
Related: Binance CEO CZ supports the Terra community but expects more transparency
Wu Blockchain tweeted on May 14 that a Singapore resident has already filed a lawsuit against Do Kwon for UST and LUNA investors.
A user on reddit claimed he prepared a police report against Do Kwon on behalf of UST and Luna investors. He said at least 1,000 Singaporeans have invested in Luna and UST. https://t.co/YzPf8iWHI7
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) May 14, 2022
Kim told Cointelegraph on May 16 that he wanted to “save the community” but that there was no major coordinator for the efforts to support victims “because there are still legal issues there.”
“I’m not a hero, but I really want to save people.”
On May 8, a sell-off in UST tokens sparked a panic that ultimately caused the price of LUNA to fall from $73 to a tiny $0.000000999967 on May 13, according to CoinGecko. UST is still disastrously decoupled from the dollar, trading at $0.16, while LUNA is virtually worthless, trading up 30.8% over the past 24 hours at $0.00026619.