UST: Incompetence, Greed, or Both?
Dirp a Dirp a Dumb!
One question that doesn't get asked about the LUNA/UST situation is WHY? Why was there so much demand to buy and hold UST? Why didn't holders realize that UST was one of the riskiest stable coins to hold out of all the stable coins?
From personal experience I can attest that one of the big reasons that people held UST instead of other stables was because it was "decentralized" and had the most stable peg out of all the other algorithmic stable coins. Ironically, the mechanics that made it have such a good peg to the dollar were the exact mechanics that inevitably caused the entire thing to implode.
This mechanic was instant conversions.
The ability to turn LUNA into UST and UST into LUNA instantly at the current market price made it extremely appealing while everything was still in working order. This tightened the peg very closely to the dollar and made it the most stable algorithmic stable coin in the world.
Unfortunately, that which does not bend, breaks.
The relationship between LUNA and UST was so rigid, that as the debt ratio increased, the thing that made UST so appealing was inevitably what led to near-instant systemic-failure. Oh, the irony.
There's also something to be said about the interpretations of how this all went down. Many make the claim that something like twenty billion dollars disappeared instantly. Yeah... that's not how debt works. Read a book or something.
In reality, the combined market cap of LUNA and UST was less than zero even before it collapsed. That's because UST is the debt of LUNA. LUNA owed back that money and was essentially longing itself on leverage. LUNA was able to go x100 in a year because of this development, but then when a bank run occurred everything crashed to zero. Clearly, the actual market cap for LUNA was less than zero because it owed so much debt back to the UST holders. Oops!
And now people are saying UST wasn't decentralized!
So the reason because people bought into UST was because it was decentralized, but the reason why it failed is because it was centralized! God, people crack me up. Crypto bros refuse to admit that it was decentralization that failed here. This was not a centralization problem. The code was flawed. Get over it. Stop saying LUNA was centralized and that's why it failed. It's a silly argument. LUNA failed because the decentralized code that governed it was an absolute joke and doomed to fail. Many predicted this event beforehand, some of them even blogged about it on Hive way before the event took place.
And now we have the hysterical FUDsters coming to chime in.
Now that UST has failed there are dozens of people on Hive trying to say that HBD can do the same thing to Hive. Wow, that's some alarmist bullshit right there. These people have no idea what they are talking about. Good thing none of them are actually in charge. The people in charge of Hive actually know how Hive works, so that's good.
I've already gone over this a couple times so I'll keep it brief
- HBD has a 3.5 day conversion.
- HBD has a 10% debt cap ratio.
- HBD has a 5% liquidity gap between HIVE>>HBD conversions and HBD>>HIVE
All of these things make HBD much more unstable than something like UST (peg breaks a lot), but they also completely prevent the systemic-failure event that UST experienced. UST was only shorted in the first place because the debt ratio was already 80%, and within days it skyrocketed to over 4000% (meaning the market cap of LUNA was x40 lower than the market cap of UST). HBD can't even go above 10%, which is something I've talked trash about multiple times but, in the wake of this disaster I have more respect for it.
Do Kwon backing UST with Bitcoin.
Many point to this as evidence that LUNA was centralized. Again, saying LUNA failed because of centralization is foolish and ignorant. It's a free market. If the founder wants to collateralize an unstable debt ratio with BTC, no one can stop them. If a billionaire said they were going to stabilize HBD, would that make HBD less decentralized? Seriously think about the logic. It's nonsense.
The fact that Do Kwon attempted this simply proves that anyone who actually looked at the debt ratio already knew it was fully unstable and extremely dangerous. Again, it's a free market. There are no regulations. Anyone can do whatever they want. A billionaire being a billionaire does not somehow magically make a decentralized protocol centralized after it fails. Seriously though this is a big thing that people need to look it. It's full on delusional thinking to believe that decentralized code can't fail, and if it does fail it must be because it was centralized. I just can't seem to get over this one. DECENTRALIZATION FAILED. End of story.
BUT BUT BUT BUT 20% APR WAS UNSUSTAINABLE!
OMFG... shut up. 20% APR was perfectly sustainable. Crypto can go +100% every year and be sustainable for over 10 years. Bitcoin has already proved that. Again, people are trying to say that the interest rate of UST is what caused it to be unstable. Like... no. Seriously. Stop. It wasn't a 20% APR that increased the debt ratio to over 100%. It was the ability to convert LUNA into UST instantly at the current market price that caused it to be overleveraged. This is so obvious. People need to stop blaming the failure on other things. Too many "20% is unsustainable" arguments. Too many "centralization" arguments. It was the conversions combined with the debt ratio. That is all. 20% interest rates played only a very small part in increasing the debt ratio.
Conclusion
People bought into UST because it was the most stable decentralized option for a stable coin. Users wrongfully assumed that because UST was decentralized it had the lowest chance of failure. In reality, anyone that looked at the debt ratio and the collateral that this debt was based off of (the LUNA market cap) would be able to see the truth. I personally never bought any UST because I never did the research. Unfortunately others blindly bought in thinking they were safe.
And then the icing on the cake of this scenario is that in retrospect after the decentralized code failed everyone refused to admit that decentralization failed, and instead wrongfully blamed the entire debacle on 'centralization'. That's not how it works. We need to stop burying our heads in the sand and admit failure when it occurs. Outsourcing our failure as "centralization" isn't going to lead to anything getting better around here in the cryptoverse.
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5 years this has been happening to me, it started here, around people that are still here. Homeland security has done nothing at all, they are not here to protect us. Dont we pay them to stop shit like this? The NSA, CIA, FBI, Police and our Government has done nothing. Just like they did with the Havana Syndrome, nothing. Patriot Act my ass. The American government is completely incompetent. The NSA should be taken over by the military and contained Immediately for investigation. I bet we can get to the sources of V2K and RNM then. https://peakd.com/gangstalking/@acousticpulses/electronic-terrorism-and-gaslighting--if-you-downvote-this-post-you-are-part-of-the-problem
When the flaws are obvious, how come there's the argument that it's centralization that brought the fail? I've seen this argument on Twitter, I think it's just a warning that such a project with that depth and all that money should take precautionary measure. Decentralization is the "thing" I don't think it's magic, it's fallible.
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Bottom line no crypto should be USD backed. Stable coins have there place of course but they won’t work long term. Unless they bow to the government
If they won’t work long term then what’s the point.
I think the major problem here is fiat usd.
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“ I think the major problem here is fiat usd.“
Indeed it is. I agree
I think that was booth.
Do Know it was greedy, thinking he discovered a new concept that would never have failed, even when some people started to talk how UST can be "easily" depegged and start a death spiral.
LFG used VC initial investment to create a FOMO around Luna and UST that attracted a lot of users to invest on it.
The Incompetence part it was the fact that they allowed UST create more than 100% LUNA debt and when the crash started the "solution" it was not allowing more LUNA to be printed making LUNA supply over 7 trilions.
Since they are not a decentralized project, when the UST depegged started they should take more quick actions to repeg the UST and don't let this death spiral continues.
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Seems like you didn't read my post because I said about a dozen times that it is a decentralized project.
How?
If UST project was really decentralized, LFG would be a DAO where a smart contract would trigger the need of actions to sell the LFG assets to keep the UST peg. However, in this case was some people that need to do everything and will not send the assets through a lot of wallets and each transaction let some part behind.
Another thing, during the problem the blockchain rule it was changed to be able to print more LUNA per day. In a true decentralized project, this needs to be voted and have more than 51% of the votes.
Instead, to start to print an infinite Luna's if they used the LFG assets correctly to buy back UST and keep the PEG much of people would not do a desperate conversion to Luna and Luna will not go to almost 0$.
Since they halted the chain when there was almost no return possible, maybe they should halted the chain when everything started to give them time to do everything.
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Hard disagree with everything you just said.
This is magical thinking.
That's a magical fairytale land where we can create a decentralized smart contract that's going to buy and sell assets across dozens of exchanges (centralized and decentralized). That tech doesn't exist. It never has existed, it very well may never exist.
So just going to rehash the same argument to answer the second question as well?
LUNA was doomed as soon as they allowed the debt ratio to go above 50% with zero cap to the upside.
There was no saving it.
LUNA leveraged USDT to get an x100 gain, and this is what they get.
Do Kwon basically tricked venture capital into parking their money on UST to get the 20% interest rate.
This trickery pumped the price of LUNA.
UST holders thought their money was safe.
The solution was to not trick billions of dollars to buy and hold UST.
A cap on the debt ratio would have prevented this entire thing from happening.
The peg on UST should be been broken as soon as the debt ratio was over 100%.
Then Luna wouldn't have crashed to zero and the debt could actually be repaid.
We are sharing opinions so you can disagree. This is not a problem for me, and it is away to learn more.
To centralized exchanges, I know that is not possible. However, using decentralized exchanges available in a chain, I know that is possible. A lot of yield farms or baby tokens already use it at least to interact with one DEX, but I think this can be changed to interact with more (the last part it as guess).
In my first comment, I mention all this related with debt ratio
You are right, saying the deep problem was the debt ratio.
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It wasn't centralized. Kek kek kek.
My view is before engaging in anything crypto, proper research should be done. This will reduce risk and eliminate lose of money.
The crash of luna really is an eye opener. Individual sentiment and assumption cannot change a coin that will drop
Pure greed! It didn't take me more than 7 seconds to check the guy's profile on LinkedIn and realise that he never worked a day in his life. He created a company right after university... which he collapsed in a short time. And now he collapsed his second company.
The guy is just a very inexperienced kid with a big ego.
It amazes me that big corporations such as Celsius and Binance invested in that crap. 😲🤪🤦♂️
Uahahhhhhaha! What a shitshow!
What do you think about the one that Tron guy is creating? It looks like a copy+paste of Luna!
lol the "tron guy"?
You'd think the "tron guy" who did a hostile takeover on this network would be a name worth remembering. kek
Justin Sun is a failure and will continue to fail up.
He's the one who shall not be named. 🤭
I thought that might be it.
Isn't that the truth. Sun will continue along his merry way, continually becoming a larger house of cards.
There will come a time when he comes toppling down. It will be interesting to see how long he can fail up for.
This could go a while.
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Yep same burn and mint mechanism with no fail safes for debt ratio going above assets marketcap or anything as much to prevent death spiral.
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So you're saying that HBD is what UST never was or will?
You have a point. Crypto people are often times lousy bitches always trying to blame someone else for their failure and stupidity.
I have lost every crypto I owned on the bad trades that I made on LUNA and you know what, neither decentralization nor centralization has the fault for that.
The one to blame is always that guy in the mirror.
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I'm saying there are tradeoffs.
HBD could never be as stable as an algo coin that does instant conversions.
But it's also not going to crash to zero along with the governance token.
Actually there are a lot of safe ways to stabilize HBD so perhaps we'll get there.
But it will take a lot of work.
Basically CDP positions and yield manipulations.
I would say the lack of arbitrage opportunities are more the reason for the failure to hold a tight peg. There number on the external exchanges are minimal outside Upbit which most cannot trade. The peg on the Internal Exchange held fairly well but there isnt enough there.
If the peg is going to truly hold, there needs to be many different LP that traders can arbitrage against. Plus, we need liquidity so the heavy hitters can move in.
For the foreseeable future, neither of them is going to happen. It will be a process to get there which is okay. However, in the meantime, the peg will break more often than it holds.
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The lack of liquidity doesn't help.
HBD exists on basically 0 exchanges now.
And it didn't have good liquidity before that either.
There are several things we could do that would make HBD more stable.
Liquidity is the backbone of all of them.
Be it CDP loans or yield manipulations or internal market AMM or exchanges or whatever else
We can't just give more money to the stabilizer?. It's meant to help with liquidity, right?.
Not a great solution because then the stabilizer would be selling the bottom to support the peg and buying the top. We need to figure out ways to create an inverse relationship where the value/demand of HBD goes up as the value of Hive does down, without dumping Hive at the bottom to do it.
What if that collateral is done with BTC. I mean Hive could have a kind of a DAO with different crypto as a way to balance HBD, without dumping Hive.
No because the stabilizer is getting paid all the DAO distributes each day less what is paid to other projects that were voted in. So it gets the max it can.
It does a good job with the peg on the internal exchange. However, need more than just one place trading it.
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Lack of liquidity is a huge factor. Lack of that liquidity brings volatility, not exactly what is sought with a stablecoin.
We need to get to the point where the conversion mechanism is used for elasticity. Have the peg derived from other means.
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There is certainly risk at some level. HBD can indeed have issues. The peg is not reliable as is. No major exchange will e we touch it. For obvious reasons. I think we’d be better off getting rid of it next Fork. Turn it into Hive and take this risk outta here. I support Hive more then any other crypto project, I just see HBD as a liability.
I'm part of those that have said Luna failed because it was centralized but from your explanation I came to understand that it failed even though it was decentralized.
I think I said that because I had limited knowledge, thank you so much for this update dear.
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The centralization is what allowed for them to quickly discard the few safeguards that were in place. If that was not done, there might have been a different outcome.
That said, the design flaw cannot be overlooked. It was an open alley for anyone to drive a truck through. Plus when you are backing a coin by something that can be attacked also, it is a problem.
At the end of the day, they did not take the time to build value. This is where I think it all went awry. With HBD we have the ability to do something completely different.
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Exactly.
Yeah, it was kind of all planned, just the way Luna rose suddenly was just the same way it dropped. And it's because it was kind of a get rich quick scheme method that was applied and HBD is nothing like that.
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It obvious that it is impossible to compare ust with hbd because hbd as always been very different from most stable coin out there and can easily lose it peg.
Ust and luna just set a major example to most project about how to fill up there holes quickly in most project.
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Growth versus security.
Always a balancing act if you want to survive long term. Obviously, security was not given much of a consideration throughout the process leading up to this.
Fortunately on Hive, we have people who obsess about it. There are a lot who game theory different aspects of this chain all the time. This allows for ideas to stem forth.
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The interesting thing about the 10% haircut is that we will be forced to increase it if demand to hold our debt increases and the peg breaks to the upside because of the haircut. The haircut only exists to protect us from the downside. However, it's hard to imagine the demand for HBD to increase exponentially without the demand to buy Hive increasing exponentially.
I would agree. The impact of HBD should roll over into HIVE. This point I think it clear. However, as you mentioned we have the safeguards in place to help protect against what happened to Luna.
One thing that we need to start discussing more in my view is how to enhance the return on people powering up HIVE. This is one thing that will help, make HIVE more attractive to HODL.
Reduce the float that is not staked, increase volatility which means upside moves. While the reverse can be true, if the incentive is high enough, the drops become BTD.
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This was a really great read. I like how you dispelled a lot of the misinformation or rumors. Not much to say beyond that. It was an informative and enjoyable read.
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Yes, there is a reason to start writing detective novels, with a more twisted plot and a denouement that neither Migret nor Poirot could handle)
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Yup. It was still centralized. If only it had more time, I am certain it would be sufficiently decentralised.
I'm sure that was the reason it was attacked.
Attack it, before it becomes to big and a threat to traditional banking system.
And yes 20% was sustainable, at least at the beginning. The rates can easily be adjusted later according to demand. And UST had a lot of demand.
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It's an excess of leveraging combined with an instant cash out. My question is how leveraged are the rest of stablecoins because this can happen in any of them if they have an excessive debt.
It was greed that makes to people to so much Luna that lead to this current market failure. It is the future expectations. Many believed in the brighter future of the market which encourages them to fall in deeply in order to bull the market. The decentralization of the currency can't really leads to what the globe is facing today.
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That debt load is crazy and I didn't even realize that the debt load was 4,000%. I didn't really feel like jumping in due to the 20% yield when that was pretty much the reason why everyone kept shilling it. At least that meant that the system itself didn't have much outside of that to attract me.
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It only became 4000% after the first few days of the attack and death-spiral.
It started out around 80% IIRC.
80% is rather high without any real use cases.
That is another factor in all this. There were not use cases for either of these tokens.
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Yeah it does all boil down to those use-cases.
Need a lot more dapps that accept HBD as payment.
That's more long-term though.
80% is still a bit too high. I think HBD is 10% and there are talks about 30% right?
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Yeah I've also been hearing 20% over the past week.
If luna had any cap at all it wouldn't have death spiraled.
there is no 5% 'liquidity gap' on HBD -> HIVE, only HIVE -> HBD
The amount of times the instant conversion debate was brought up when comparing UST to HBD...
Yikes.
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I will add breaking the HBD pegg to the dollar once the debt is reached and moving with the underlining asset, that basicly makes it impossible to superinflate hive
Yeah, I agree it's just a talking point or maybe even an excuse the tie they had was dumb Lyn Alwood even tweeted about this exact risk situation before it happened.
Also, thank you for covering the HBD safety net.
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thanks, made it a lot clearer!
this is one time when almost going all in on Hive saved me from something stupid like this (for now)
Heh same here. I mean I had hbd. Why hold UST. Although I hear it’s good to diversify but I’ll rather diversify into what I know well to an extent. Hbd I knew to a large extent, UST, not at all.
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It's clear that a decentralized token is better and valuable than the centralised token.
In either way if a decentralized token happens to fall then it should be accepted the way it is, market prices are not always stable.
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Just yesterday I read about Do Kwon's other project previous to LUNA which also failed. The news didn't mention it when LUNA was flying high though. What was its name? Simple Cash or something?
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This Luna drama is about to last only this year. As the market recovers we will soon forget and move on to fun things.
UST was a test bed for stablecoim. I mean it is the only one failing. The others still remain in contention.
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We need to stop burying our heads in the sand and admit failure when it occurs. — yeah right ! It is what it is . No need crying over spilled milk ..
funny how people suddenly bring the centralization argument into light when they clearly know the platform is decentralized. It seriously beats my imagination!
Cryptocurrency..."currency" .. Currencies are useful. Speculative pie in the sky investments are typically bullshit I'm glad you guys losing your money a fool and his money is soon parted.
Creating algorithimic pyramid schemes won't solve the problem and you greedy bitconnectors.. i was glad when you lost all your money there too because i know what drives you all. The pegs don't hold because that's not true value there nor is it for hbd so it will eventually fail
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As they say, "Speed can kill.". The attractive yield in Anchor plus the "riskless" and immediate conversion between UST and LUNA were a recipe for disaster. In particular as Anchor was a purely financial proposition. With no use case associated with it.
And once that equation changed, i.e. the reduction in yield in Anchor since mid-March, the hot money left. As soon as it could. Damn the consequences for everyone else. Just like with lots and lots ill-thought out financial get-rich-quick schemes over the centuries.
This leaves no doubt in my mind that a slow approach to growing HBD is more than worth it.
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I didn’t buy because I had HBD which I understood more and was more comfortable with holding. Plus not so long after I knew about UST was the 20% apr addition to hbd savings so I had no reason to hold UST
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I've tried to understand how all this went down but I fall at the first hurdle. Where the hell was the actual value in Luna itself? Were there Dapps being developed? Was there a community that believed its vision to help solve anything? Speaking as a hive person all I can see is that it was a network of Greater fooldom.
With that said I am worried that Hive/HBD will get tared with the same brush.
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Never bought luna or UST, but im thinking of buying some more HBDso another great article from you again :)
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