Dumb or genius? The trader who played against LUNA now has his money against Do Kwon’s new crypto LUNC

There probably isn’t a person who hasn’t heard about the high-profile failure of Do Kwon’s Terraform Labs Terra LUNA project. Suppose you don’t know anything about it; here is that tragic story in a nutshell.

Terraform Labs developed the Terra blockchain, on which the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin and the Terra network token (LUNA) were built. UST and LUNA collapsed in May 2022, taking about $45 billion in market capitalization with them. Many people worldwide have lost all the money they invested in LUNA. Some investors have lost tens of millions of dollars!

And then Do Kwon’s coin LUNC (Terra Classic) came on the scene. Actually, it’s just a new ticker of LUNA. The stablecoin UST is now called TerraClassicUSD (USTC). It would seem that you can’t enter the same river twice, but… the new investors rushed to buy up. At the end of August, USTC was one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies rising in value.

The surprises don’t end there. A well-known crypto trader under the alias Gigantic Rebirth (aka GCR) made a $10 million wager over the future price of LUNA. GCR sold LUNA for $10 million after betting that the coin would be worth less than $88 by March 2023. As you know, the price slid to $0 much earlier.

Now GCR has taken on LUNC. He opened a shortA short sale, or short position, is the sale of assets borrowed, that is, those that the trader does not currently own. With shorts, the trader earns on a fall in price, not on its rise. LUNC position on 22B (total value $8 million) and now claims the price will be $0 again. As of September 13, the value is $0.0003581.

Now commenters on Reddit (just like us) don’t know what to think. Is this crypto trader dumb or genius?

• “Many people in the LUNC community are calling him out for faking his trade, which he is not. The LUNC community is showing its delusion once again. It’s like they never learn.”
• “This is wallstreetbets level of crazy, and I’m here for it. Good luck to this madman.”
• “This guy is crazier than wsb tbh; he is also a $40M long open on BTC simultaneously.”
• “Not crazy he is just hedging against possible losses.”
• “Literal madlad.”
• “Not gonna lie, the thought of seeing all of that loss p*rn sounds dirty to me will be my guilty little secret. You son of a b**ch, I’m in.”
• “He’s doing well so far. LUNC is bleeding hard.”
• “Seems like these huge gambles have a way of going south extremely fast.”

For context, GCR is one of the best traders on the FTX centralized cryptocurrency exchange in terms of PnL (stands for profit and loss), and he has been on the FTX leaderboard for the past two years. His bet on LUNC dropping to zero doesn’t look like such an empty bravado now.

By the way, GCR already has 178.7K followers on Twitter, even though he registered there only in July 2020. He seems to know how to get attention.