Terra shuts down indefinitely after coming back online; LUNA, UST still on life support

Terra officially halted block production at 09:58 am HKT on Friday, block height 7607789, after restarting the network from an overnight shutdown to prevent possible governance attacks. Terra said validators are working on a plan to restart the network but did not release any further details.

See related article: Terra plunges back to earth as UST stablecoin loses dollar peg

Fast facts

• Terra had resumed block production at 01:45 am HKT on Friday after network validators shut down the blockchain for more than an hour and a half.

• A governance attack is a form of a hostile blockchain takeover when a single party controls at least 50% of a network’s governance tokens, giving them rights to majority voting power in the ecosystem.

• The plunge in Terra’s governance token LUNA has significantly reduced the cost to conduct a takeover.

• Terra released a patch disabling delegations — staking tokens to a public validator node to earn further rewards — on the network which was adopted once the network resumed production.

• LUNA was worth US$0.004157 at press time, and Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin has yet to regain its peg to the greenback.

• UST’s peg to the dollar is maintained by regulating LUNA supply.

• Terra proposed an upgrade on Thursday to increase production of LUNA to attempt to save the stablecoin’s peg.

See related article: Terra’s UST fiasco cited by Yellen, who warns about stablecoins