Binance Misses Monthly Luna Classic Burn for First Time Since 2023

Centralized exchange Binance has burned Luna Classic tokens on the first of every month since 2023, when Do Kwon's Terra Luna empire came crumbling down. At the start of November, however, that burn has not occurred.

Luna Classic (LUNC) is the original native token for the Terra blockchain, which Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon forked and left behind in 2022 in a bid to rescue his collapsing project. Kwon was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in Terra’s $40 billion implosion. Yet the decentralized network he left behind has kept running, propped up by a passionate community of supporters who have sunk time, effort and money into keeping it alive. 

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Binance started the burns after Terra Classic’s community voted to burn a portion of every on-chain LUNC transaction in late 2022, with the exchange pledging to burn half of the trading fees earned from the token. In practice, this has come in the form of a batch of burns happening at the start of every month since March 2023, but, according to StatsBin data, November's burn has yet to come in.

Some Luna Classic investors are concerned about Binance's lack of monthly burn, while others point to last week's record-breaking hack of the exchange as a reason behind the burn's delay.

"It is an important sign of support and a vital part of the overall burn campaign," Dawid Skinder, brand and user experience ecosystem contributor for Terra Classic, told Decrypt. "It might be that it is just an operational issue after the biggest hack ever. Hopefully that is the case, Terra Classic does not need another problem."

Binance was hacked for $6.3 billion on Friday, which the FBI has attributed to TraderTraitor—the North Korean group blamed for the Bybit hack. It has been labelled the biggest crypto hack in history, with estimated losses at four times the previous record of $1.5 billion from the Bybit heist.

The exchange has been reopening withdrawals on the platform in stages, with the latest taking place late on Monday for dozens of Ethereum and Solana tokens. Some investors have questioned whether the LUNC burn is a priority for the exchange as it attempts to recover from the hack.

"Yes, the hack was a problem," prominent Luna Classic community member Pedro, better known as Vegas, told Decrypt. "At the moment, we are helping them to keep LUNC and LUNA safe."

Binance did not respond to Decrypt's request for comment.

The exchange has paused its LUNC burns once before, withholding contributions at the end of 2022 after the Terra Classic community voted to re-mint burned tokens as a development fund. Binance halved its burn to 50% of trading fees and only resumed in March 2023, once the community had scrapped the re-mints.

Luna Classic has dropped 7.9% in value over the past week to $0.0000417, per Decrypt data, and is down 99.99% from its all-time high of $119.18. Investors believe the Binance burn being paused is just one of many issues the token faces. 

Skinder told Decrypt that Luna Classic needs to fix its lack of products, improve its marketing, conduct a proper audit, and protect itself against quantum attacks. Skinder said he believes in a revival but claims that it is difficult with decentralized governance and "amateur validators."

So, why bother? Why not spend time on another chain?

"There are X number of chains in a better state than Terra Classic. None of them (except Bitcoin, probably) have that history and narrative (biggest crypto revival ever). None of them have 20+ stablecoins that are waiting to be re-pegged and restored," Skinder said. "Low chance of success, big upside if done. Great history to be part of."