Photo: Financial Express
Market crashes are common and often leave enough room to breathe and rebuild, but the recent crypto market crash has left millions, even billionaires, with little to scavenge. The selloffs in Terra UST and sister token Luna’s collapse have crippled billionaires in particular, while other cryptocurrencies have significantly dropped off. Ethereum and its co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, were left reeling.
Ethereum is a community-run technology that powers the cryptocurrency Ether or ETH, which has been used to acquire Non-Fungible Tokens. The cryptocurrency is also home to digital money, global payments, and applications. Founded in 2014, it quickly rose to the top of the market, sitting behind Bitcoin. However, the market crash has seen it take a heavy fall.
On November 16, 2021, Ether reached new heights with the price of $4,891.79, giving co-founder Buterin holders worth $1.5 billion. However, the months that followed saw the cryptocurrency make a gradually steeper correction.
Last Sunday, it traded over $2,015, currently up by 2.4%, with a market cap of $243.5 billion, making up 15% of the crypto market. However, the volume trading in Ether today is down by more than 32.4%. Over the last seven days, it plunged by over 3%, while tipped to fall over 33%. As a result, Ether took a massive nosedive by nearly 59% compared to its November milestone last year. In a year, the downside is expected to be over 12%.
The crypto market’s crash prompted billionaires to announce the losses they suffered on social media. Buterin took to Twitter to reveal that he was no longer a billionaire, and he wasn’t alone.
Michael Novogratz, the founder of Galaxy Inc, a crypto merchant bank, penned a letter to shareholders, friends, partners, and the crypto community, acknowledging that Terra UST and LUNA “was a big idea that failed.” His sentiments were echoed by Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, who tweeted that he was poor again.
CZ revealed that Binance received 15 million LUNA tokens for its investment of $3 million into the Terra network. When it peaked last April, the investments in stable coins reached $1.6 billion. However, CZ did not sell any LUNA when the stable coin crashed to zero limits.
Currently, LUNA is valued at around $0.015888, crashing to nearly 100%.
