USTC: what is left of Terra’s fallen dollar

What USTC is now

USTC, or TerraClassicUSD, is the token that used to be UST, the algorithmic stablecoin of the original Terra chain. When UST lost its dollar peg in May 2022 and the chain split, the old network became Terra Classic and UST was renamed USTC. It still lives on that chain, next to LUNC, and you can hold, send and trade it. What it no longer does is track the dollar.

USTC is now a speculative token priced at a small fraction of a dollar. The gauge next to the headline shows its live price against the one-dollar line it once promised. Its all-time low on CoinGecko was $0.00406362 on 5 February 2026, which shows how far below its old target it can sit. Even the community has stopped calling it a stablecoin: Proposal 12168, passed in March 2025, asked CoinMarketCap to remove the "Stablecoin" tag from USTC.

How the old peg worked

UST had no dollar reserve in a bank. Instead, the chain's market module let anyone swap 1 UST for one dollar's worth of newly minted LUNA, or the other way round. Arbitrage traders were supposed to keep the price at $1 by buying UST below a dollar and redeeming it, or minting it above a dollar and selling it.

That worked until confidence broke. From 7 May 2022, large UST sales pushed the price under a dollar, redemptions minted huge amounts of LUNA, and LUNA's falling price meant each redemption needed even more new coins. Total LUNA supply went from about 725 million to roughly 6.9 trillion. Our Terra Luna crash page covers those days in detail, and the difference between the old and new chains is on the LUNC vs LUNA page.

From 18.77 billion to about 6 billion

At block 7,544,000 on 7 May 2022, just before the run, the total UST supply was 18,768,439,974. The on-chain total has since fallen to roughly 6.07 billion USTC. Most of that drop happened during the crash itself: every UST redeemed through the market module was burned in exchange for fresh LUNA, so the stablecoin's supply shrank while LUNA's exploded.

Governance has burned more since. Proposal 12135, passed in September 2024, burned 729,976,293 USTC sitting in old Anchor Protocol contracts. Proposal 12138, passed a few weeks later, burned 46,556,271 USTC from Mirror. Earlier votes about burning large USTC amounts, such as Proposal 11710 in 2023, were signals only.

Aggregators report a lower circulating figure of around 5.6 billion, because they exclude some wallets. The pattern is the same as for LUNC, which we explain on our LUNC supply page: always say whether you mean the on-chain total or an aggregator's circulating number.

A dollar in name only

USTC still carries the USD in its name, but nothing on-chain promises a dollar back. Its price is set purely by traders on exchanges and DEXes.

Why swaps and minting are off

On Terra Classic, two live parameters keep USTC disconnected from LUNC. The market module's min_stability_spread is 1.0, a 100% spread, so a native LUNC to USTC swap would cost everything you put in. That has been the case since the crash. In addition, Proposal 11868, passed on 10 November 2023, raised the Tobin tax on every whitelisted oracle denomination to 100%, which disabled USTC minting.

The reason is simple arithmetic. If the old module came back unchanged, anyone could buy USTC on the market for well under a cent and redeem each one for a full dollar of newly minted LUNC. That would be free money for arbitrage traders and a fresh wave of LUNC inflation, which is the exact opposite of what the burn community wants. Keeping the switch off protects LUNC holders from a repeat of May 2022.

Trading between LUNC and USTC is still possible at market prices on DEXes such as Terraswap Classic, Terraport, Garuda, CL8Y and WESO, on Osmosis pools or on exchanges that list both. Our LUNC swap guide shows how. On-chain transfers and swaps can also be subject to the 1.5% burn tax, a rate governance can change by vote, so read our burn tax guide before moving large amounts.

The repeg proposals

"USTC repeg" is one of the most persistent ideas in the Terra Classic community, and several proposals have touched it. The important detail is the word "signal". A signal or text proposal records what voters want, but it changes no code and no parameter. Here is the record from the chain.

Proposal 11487 passed with 89.6% yes, but 44.6% of voting power abstained, and its plan relied on negotiating with centralized exchanges. Proposal 12188 described Market Module 2.0 as a "net-deflation engine" that would work without hyperminting. Proposal 12209 aims to begin development of a collateralized stablecoin module, with development offered for free and liquidity to be requested later. Proposal 12219 sets out a USTC staking framework, but its second phase needs a separate vote, with an example figure of about 30 million USTC from the community pool paying 2.5–5% APR. You can follow new votes on our governance page.

Curious about the Classic side?

If you decide to hold LUNC rather than chase a USTC repeg, start with USDT, send it to an exchange that lists Terra Classic and check withdrawals before you trade.

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Why any repeg needs collateral

A stablecoin holds its peg when holders believe they can get a dollar back. For USTC that means someone must be ready to buy it at, or close to, $1. Here is the worked example. With roughly 6 billion USTC on-chain, defending a full one-dollar peg would require on the order of $6 billion in buying power or reserves. For comparison, LUNC's entire market cap has been in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, and the community pool holds tens of millions of USTC plus roughly 9 billion LUNC. The gap is many times larger than everything the chain owns.

That is why the serious proposals avoid the old mint-and-burn route and talk about collateral, gradual buybacks or staking rewards instead. A partial or incremental repeg, where USTC creeps up in steps, would still need a source of money to buy USTC from sellers at each step. A collateralized module, like the one Proposal 12209 sketches, would need real assets deposited before it could promise anything. Without that money, a repeg is a slogan, not a mechanism.

Risks of holding USTC

USTC can move fast, and repeg headlines can push its price around. That makes it tempting for traders, but the risks are concrete.

There is also no legal route back to a dollar. The Terraform Labs wind-down trust accepted crypto-loss claims for losses on UST and LUNA, but that window closed in 2025, and buying USTC now gives no claim. If you hold USTC, keep it in a Terra Classic wallet you control, as described on our wallets page.

Where USTC trades

USTC has far fewer venues than LUNC, and the list has shrunk. Binance runs a USTCUSDT perpetual futures contract, onboarded on 27 November 2023, and Binance TR lists a USTC/TRY pair. On Terra Classic itself, USTC trades on native DEXes and on Osmosis through IBC. Hyperlane bridge routes, approved in late 2025 and placed under governance control in October 2026, also connect USTC and LUNC to Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana.

Several big names have left. OKX delisted its USTC/USDT pair together with its LUNC pairs in September 2025, and suspended withdrawals from 22 December 2025. Kraken's December 2025 delisting notice removed USTC, which Kraken listed under the ticker UST, together with LUNA2. Withdrawals stayed open until 28 February 2026, and remaining balances were set for liquidation from 1 March 2026. Coinbase lists its legacy UST market as delisted, and Binance.US has no USTC symbol.

For an up-to-date list of where LUNC itself trades, including the pairs in Asian currencies, see our LUNC exchange list. Exchange-listing changes are also tracked in LUNC news.

Will USTC repeg?

Based on what is on-chain, we do not expect a full one-dollar repeg. Every passed proposal is a signal, the switches that once linked USTC to LUNC are still off by design, and no one has put forward the billions in collateral a peg would need. Smaller projects, such as USTC staking or a new collateralized module, may still give USTC a use. They would not, by themselves, bring the price back to a dollar.