Meet the Guys Still Clinging To the Terra Luna That Do Kwon Abandoned

Pedro wipes the sleep from his eyes, kisses his wife on the cheek, and rolls over to pick up his phone to check on his Luna Classic validators. In the real world, he’s waking up for his job as the head brewer at a beerhouse. But in the virtual one, he’s known as Vegas, one of the leading voices in the Terra Luna Classic community.

Terra Luna Classic is the blockchain that was forked and abandoned when Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon attempted to save his crumbling empire in 2022. Kwon has since been convicted of fraud and sentenced to 15 years in prison over the $40 billion collapse of Terra. But the network he and his company created—decentralized as it is—lives on, with the support of individuals from around the world who have poured significant amounts of time and money into the project.

Vegas told Decrypt he had approximately $50,000 invested in Terra at the time of its collapse, subsequently finding himself at ground zero when efforts began to salvage the project.

Nowadays, as he walks downstairs in the morning, phone in hand, he checks in on the Terra developer group chat, then his emails for any exploit concerns, and then scrolls through the community Telegram and Discord chats while making himself breakfast. Most days, in the morning or while at work, Vegas will act as a point of contact for community members who have support requests or for developers who need help with proposals.

“In the middle of this, I have to fight all of the drama that is all over Twitter,” the Portuguese-born Vegas told Decrypt, calling it a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job. “If you ask my wife, she will say that I’m crazy, but no. I think there’s still hope on the chain. I think there’s massive potential for this chain to be a top 10 chain again.”

Despite his dedication, Vegas isn’t without his detractors. When Decrypt joined the Terra Classic Telegram group to speak with Vegas, we received several DMs accusing Vegas of being a scammer himself. Vegas says it comes with the territory—the perils of decentralization and internal power struggles, even within a group that has suffered one of the worst collapses in crypto’s short history.

“Decentralization is amazing, but at the same time, it is cruel because people want to take the spotlight,” Vegas told Decrypt. “I’ve had physical problems in my real life with people calling the police to my house, to my work, and some other stuff … horrible, horrible times.”

Where did this all begin?

When Terra collapsed back in 2022, the price of the LUNA token was in free fall, the network’s native stablecoin UST had depegged, and Do Kwon made his now infamous “steady lads” call on social media to rally his believers.

In a last-ditch effort, Terraform Labs hard forked the network to remove the depegged algorithmic stablecoin UST, leaving behind the original chain with the new name of Terra Luna Classic—much like Ethereum Classic.

With its creators abandoning the original Terra Luna chain, a group of community members called the Terra Rebels started to congregate on Discord. In the short term, the Discord channel doubled as a support network with pseudonymous moderator “K_raucks” creating a suicide help line of sorts.

“A lot of people needed someone to talk to. And it’s anonymous on these spaces, so we allowed the space for them to express these feelings,” K_raucks told Decrypt. “It’s hard when people have lost everything.”

The community’s first step to rebuilding the chain was proposal 3568, which introduced a 1.2% burn tax on all transactions of Terra Luna Classic, which trades as LUNC. The hope was that it would help boost demand for LUNC and therefore boost its price. The proposal was authored by Vegas and was the source of his first criticism from detractors, who claim it was just a marketing move.

The Terra Rebels continued through the summer and autumn of 2022, attempting to rebuild the chain. Things then came to a head in December when the Terra Rebels received $150,000 from the community pool to separate the Rebel Station wallet’s infrastructure from Terraform Labs. This caused community uproar and accusations that the Terra Rebels were trying to centralize power on the chain, and the group disbanded.

Tensions within the LUNC community then flared.

“The situation is simple to explain: If you see someone who you think is winning money and profiting from the chain, you want their position. And you will do every single thing to make their life very, very, very messy,” Vegas said.

As a result of the messy politics, Vegas explained, many developers have left Terra Luna Classic over the years.

Amidst this power struggle, the community continued to build. One of these projects includes lending protocol Juris Protocol, which aims to be an Anchor protocol alternative but without the “ponzinomics,” its founder Puya Eghtessadi told Decrypt. Others have released meme coins, crypto games, and have formulated plans to repeg the chain’s stablecoins.

The community’s efforts have seen some modest success, with the price LUNC gaining 17.3% over the past year, per CoinGecko data. The token, however, has fallen 28.7% since proposal 3568 was first introduced in 2022 and is down 99.99% from its all-time high of $119.

While Vegas lies in bed at night dreaming that LUNC will regain its top 10 status one day, many others within the community feel like they’ve found a family, bonded through trauma—and price action is secondary. And like many families, it’s dysfunctional.

“There is a sense of camaraderie, people are going through or have gone through traumatic [events], but you still have this common goal,” K_raucks told Decrypt. “What if we can pull off one of the greatest comebacks ever? It’s the freaking Hail Mary.”