Terra’s UST flips BUSD to become third-largest stablecoin

The Terra blockchain’s algorithmic stablecoin Terra USD (UST) has flipped Binance USD (BUSD) to become the third-largest stablecoin on the market.

UST is a United States dollar-pegged stablecoin that was launched in September 2020. Its minting mechanism requires a user to burn a reserve asset such as Terra (LUNA) to mint an equivalent amount of UST.

According to CoinGecko, UST’s total market capitalization has surged 15% over the past 30 days to sit at roughly $17.5 billion at the time of writing. The figure currently places UST as the third-largest stablecoin after it flipped BUSD with a slightly lower market cap of $17.46 billion.

The asset now trailing only behind industry giants Tether (USDT) at $82.8 billion, and USD Coin (USDC) at $50 billion. However, the gap is quite substantial at this stage.

The data also shows that UST has been on a meteoric pump since mid-November, with the market cap increasing by 525% since then.

Despite flipping BUSD in terms of market cap, UST is trading in volumes well below its immediate competitor, with Binance’s stablecoin seeing $2.26 billion worth of trading volume over the past 24 hours compared to UST’s $431.79 million.

According to CoinGecko, the market value of Terra's stablecoin UST reached $17.5 billion on April 18, surpassing BUSD's $17.4 billion, becoming the third-largest stablecoin after USDT and USDC. But UST’s trading volume is very low, only 1/5 of BUSD.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) April 18, 2022

Terra has been grabbing the headlines of late, partly due to co-founder Do Kwon, who recently vowed that the project will accrue a whopping $10 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) to back its UST reserves.

Related Terraform Labs gifts another $880M to Luna Foundation Guard

Much like the wider crypto market of late, however, bullish announcements are doing little to push the price of LUNA upwards. The token’s price is down 12.4% over the past 30 days to sit at $77.31, while it is also down 34.4% since its brief all-time high of $119.18 on April 5.