The creator of Cardano ($ADA), Charles Hoskinson, has revealed that the network’s Vasil hard fork, which is expected to deliver a “massive performance improvement” to it, was partly delayed because of Terra’s collapse, as the team decided to be extra cautious.

In a newly published video, Hoskinson noted that the Cardano development team opted to exercise caution before shipping out the Vasil hard fork after Terra’s ecosystem collapsed, noting he “gave a directive to a lot of the engineers to say we should probably measure three times and cut once given the nature of things.”

Hoskinson noted that the code for the hard fork is ready, meaning “you probably could flip the switch and get away with it,” but Cardano decided to add additional tests to the Plutus suite, Cardano’s smart contract platform, and go “above and beyond what we normally do for hard forks.”

Terraform Labs’ algorithmic stablecoin UST lost its peg after a $500 million withdrawal from its Anchor Protocol led to a large sale on Curve, where liquidity was low. The sale saw UST lose its peg and triggered a bank run.

Because of the algorithmic system behind UST, trillions of LUNA were printed while the stablecoin’s value kept on dropping. Both ended up being nearly worthless.

The Vasil hard fork is a major upgrade that will involve four Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs). The hard fork has already seen ADA outperform numerous other cryptocurrencies, even amid a wider cryptocurrency market downturn exacerbated by the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. That performance saw ADA become the seventh-largest cryptoasset by market capitalization, surpassing $XRP.

Honsinkon also said that a desire for inclusivity in the quality assurance and testing process also contributed to the hard fork’s delay, as after having “an enormous amount of contract with dApp [decentralized application] developers and other people,” there was a “desire to be a bit more inclusive in the quality assurance process and the testing process.”

The hard fork was initially scheduled to go out on June 29, but the developers behind it postponed it until the last week of July.

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Blockchain analytics company Nansen linked the de-peg of Terra’s US dollar stablecoin to seven large crypto wallets, among them a wallet associated with crypto lending platform Celsius, whose massive sales of UST triggered a stampede for the exit.

UST maintained its peg to the US dollar through a complex network of arbitrageurs – traders who bought and sold the token, as well as a linked, volatile crypto called LUNA, to profit from price differences across exchanges and DeFi liquidity pools.

This all worked pretty well since UST launched in December 2020 – until the market lost confidence in the mechanism earlier this month, sending the network into a death spiral that plunged UST to $0.02 and LUNA from well over $100 to fractions of a cent.

Nansen’s report, released Friday, claims that seven arbitrageurs contributed to UST’s depegging by flooding shallow liquidity pools on Curve with huge amounts of UST. 

Liquidity providers on Curve, then DeFi’s largest protocol by total value locked, are incentivized to maintain the prices of tokens in liquidity pools by balancing their supplies with other, similarly priced tokens, but huge withdrawals and inflows can temporarily throw the price of the tokens out of whack. 

Using on-chain data, Nansen traced seven power users who may have triggered the depeg when they rushed to sell huge amounts of UST on Curve.

The seven wallets withdrew UST from Anchor  – Terra’s lending product that offered yields of close to 20% before its collapse – sent them to Ethereum via multi-chain bridge Wormhole, then swapped them on Curve, the largest DeFi protocol, for other stablecoins.

Deluge of Sales

Right before the depeg, the seven wallets, including the one linked to Celsius, sent so much UST to Curve that the price of the stablecoin went awry. 

Luna Foundation Guard – a Terra-linked organization that tried to defend UST’s peg – tried to counteract this by withdrawing about 150M UST from Curve on May 7, and adding other stablecoins back into the Curve pool.

But shortly after, five other addresses sold another deluge of UST on Curve. LFG attempted to defend the peg once again by withdrawing 189.6M UST. The war continued into the morning of May 8. 

Between May 7 and May 10, Nansen reported that the top 20 addresses withdrew 2B UST from Anchor – about 11% of UST’s market cap at the time. The Block reported on May 13 that Celsius pulled out at least $500M of funds from Anchor.

But LFG’s attempts to balance the Curve pool were insufficient in the face of relentless selling. UST inflows to centralized exchanges like Binance gathered momentum on May 9. That peaked on May 10, when 165M UST was sent to centralized exchanges. 

The on-chain data disputes the popular belief that a single ‘bad actor’ crashed Terra’s US dollar stablecoin earlier this month.

“While many of these wallets were likely acting independently, collectively, arbitrageurs influenced a liquidity imbalance that ultimately led to the UST/LUNA death spiral,” Nansen tweeted. 

Even without Anchor, Celsius still offers interest rates of up to 9.32% on stablecoin deposits, so long as interest is paid in CEL, the platform’s utility token. The token fell sharply when UST depegged, from about $2.17 to $0.63.

Do Kwon, the founder of Terra, has since relaunched LUNA on a new blockchain, Terra 2.0. The new chain doesn’t feature an algorithmic stablecoin. 

• Dogecoin was the most-googled in 23 states, including in Florida, Illinois and Michigan, according to financial advisor The Advisor Coach.
• The meme crypto’s widespread popularity was partly down to Tesla CEO Elon Musk who has cheered the token on this year.
• Bitcoin came in second place, while ether was third, according to the report.
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There’s no doubt that 2021 has been the Year of the Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is being heralded as an inflation hedge on a par with gold and ether is rapidly becoming the cryptocurrency of choice for decentralized finance, play-to-earn games, digital collectors’ items, known as non-fungible tokens, and likely soon, the metaverse. 

But it’s not either of these two cryptocurrencies that have captured the public’s imagination.

Dogecoin, which was founded by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmers in 2013 as a joke, has been the most searched-for cryptocurrency in the largest number of states so far this year, according to research by The Advisor Coach, a financial advisor. The coin, which is based on an internet meme of a Japanese Shiba Inu dog, was the most-googled in 23 states, including Florida, Illinois and Michigan. 

This year, it shot to prominence, thanks in large part to the Twitter-based cheerleading of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, who is a known crypto enthusiast that holds dogecoin, bitcoin and ether. Musk even went so far as saying in May this year that he might accept dogecoin as payment for his company’s electric vehicles.

By that point, dogecoin was already beloved among the army of Reddit retail traders, who had pushed the coin up to around $0.07, from closer to $0.007 at the start of the year and Musk’s payment remark sent the price to a record $0.70. It’s since eased to around $0.24, but it’s still one of the crypto stars of 2021, with a gain of nearly 5,000% so far.

“The rise in interest can be partially attributed to the endorsement of Elon Musk who stated earlier in the year that Tesla would accept dogecoin as a form of payment,” The Advisor Coach note said. 

Crypto traders’ adoration of Musk extends well beyond what coins he holds and has given rise to dogecoin spinoffs. The Tesla boss even owns a Shiba Inu. There’s now a shiba inu coin, and even a floki inu, named after Musk’s real-life pup, Floki.

By contrast, bitcoin, the biggest and original cryptocurrency, was the most-searched for in just 10 states, including Connecticut, Alaska and Mississippi, ranking it second in the list. Bitcoin has led the surge in appetite for and adoption of cryptocurrencies.  The total market value of crypto assets is hovering at close to $3 trillion, having risen from around $500 billion a year earlier, according to CoinGecko.

Ether came in third place, being the most searched in eight states, while shiba inu landed in fourth place. Interestingly, shiba inu was the most-searched for cryptocurrency in New York, home to Wall Street and the country’s most powerful financial institutions.