Terra founder Do Kwon wants to become the second largest Bitcoin holder after Nakamoto
Terra founder Do Kwon is poised to become the second-largest Bitcoin holder after Satoshi Nakamoto as his Bitcoin accumulation activity accelerates. Kwon is not concerned about a Bitcoin price drop that would adversely affect the UST price, rather he expects Bitcoin to continue to rise.
Do Kwon was one of the most influential figures in the crypto industry that year, with his project Terra cementing his position in the top ten. Lately, however, it’s his commitment to Bitcoin that’s making waves. In a recent podcast, he announced his goal — to become the second-largest Bitcoin holder after Satoshi Nakamoto.
Kwon guest-starred on the popular Unchained podcast hosted by Laura Shin. There he talked about Terra and how LUNA and UST work, why he decided to adopt the Bitcoin standard for UST and what would happen to UST if the Bitcoin price crashed. In the hour-long podcast, he also made some of his controversial claims — for which he is notorious — including that Terra has become a Layer 2 solution for Bitcoin.
According to Kwon, should Bitcoin crash in the near future, it would have a negative impact on UST.
“The worst case scenario would be that we buy bitcoin and six months later there is a crash that correlates with a massive drop in demand for UST. […] I’m kind of betting that the long-term scenario of bitcoin rising and reserves being strong enough to weather a drop in UST demand is the more likely scenario.”
Terra has been accumulating bitcoin via the Luna Foundation Guard to back its UST stablecoin. Unlike Tether, USD Coin and other top stablecoins, UST is not backed by real dollars. Rather, it is backed by an algorithmic burn of LUNA tokens, with each UST pegged to $1 worth of LUNA.
Do Kwon’s goal is to become the second largest Bitcoin holder after Nakamoto.
“I think if we go to $10 billion – the reason I want $10 billion in bitcoin is because we’re going to be the largest single holder in the world next to Nakamoto.”
At press time, UST’s market cap was $16.5 billion, ranking it 14th in the world’s cryptocurrency rankings and the fourth-largest stablecoin after Tether, USDC, and Binance USD. Kwon has the ambitious goal of making UST the largest stablecoin in the world. To achieve that, Terra would need to generate about four times as many UST tokens as there are currently in existence, given Tether’s market cap of $82.1 billion.
Kwon explained:
“Terra’s goal is to become the largest decentralized cryptocurrency, period. The goal is not to become the largest stablecoin on the Terra blockchain, so we are expanding to the Solana, Avalanche, Ethereum, and Polygon ecosystems. We plan to be wherever there are developers and customers.”
