Investors continue to trade the LUNA token despite its enormous fall, seeing the coin lose 99% of its value from $62 on May 9 down to less than a cent by May 14. However, on May 20, LUNA remains the most trending cryptocurrency searched on CoinMarketCap.
With a market cap of $918 million, LUNA is trading at $0.00013 per coin. The coin has gained 1% in the last 24 hours and 75% last week.
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It’s worth noting that even though the price of this cryptocurrency had fallen dramatically over the past few days and South Korean officials were looking into penalizing its inventor for $78 million in tax avoidance, we see the coin trending higher than ever before.
The South Korean authorities are investigating why the value of Terra’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, UST lost its peg on May 9. The market for this coin quickly melted down within four days. As a result, the stablecoin lost $18 billion. This affected not only the stablecoin UST but also all networks built upon it, such as LUNA, whose price plummetted from $62 per coin down to a fraction of a penny.
Tax Authorities Fined LUNA Founder For Avoiding Taxes
In order to investigate, both South Korean regulatory bodies, the Financial Supervisory Service and the Financial Services Commission called the local cryptocurrency exchanges to submit the transactions data.
The information requested from the local exchanges includes trade volumes for LUNA and UST as well the number of investors who have suffered losses because their investments declined during this time period.
On the data request, a local exchange operator, Yonhap, said;
It seems that they collected this information in order to minimize damage to investors in the future.
The Korean National Tax Service has found that Terra’s parent firms have avoided paying corporate and income taxes. The company moved LUNA from its software firm, Terraform Labs, to Singapore’s Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) to avoid paying taxes.
Do Kwon was fined $78 million by the tax department for acquiring and selling $3 billion in Bitcoin LFG. In addition, the Terra inventor could face further fines from the tax department.
The NTS requested that Do Kwon and Daniel Shin pay $100 million in taxes in December. However, the two men declined since their company, Terraform Labs, is domiciled in Singapore. The NTS argues that all of Terraform Lab’s operations are controlled from South Korea, but the two men maintain that their business is conducted primarily in Singapore.
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In addition, only a few days before Terra collapsed, Do Kwon attempted to dissolve Terra’s Korean entities. There is speculation among onlookers about how long before the chain crumbled, Do Kwon had been prepared for Terra’s downfall.
The founder of Terra is being sued by 200,000 people in Korea who invested in either LUNA or UST.
Featured image from Flickr, and chart from Tradingview.com
