What if you bought Terra Luna in 2020?
Crypto · Stablecoin. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $2,092
Every dollar is gone. Terra Luna went to zero in three days in May 2022, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
Luna was the native token of Terra, a blockchain created by Terraform Labs, co-founded by Do Kwon. Its centrepiece was UST, an algorithmic stablecoin that held its dollar peg not with cash reserves but through a mechanism in which UST could always be swapped for a dollar's worth of newly minted Luna. Demand for UST was turbocharged by Anchor Protocol, which offered depositors close to 20 percent annual yield. As money poured in, Luna rose from well under a dollar in early 2021 to more than $100 in April 2022, making it one of the largest cryptocurrencies.
In May 2022 large withdrawals pushed UST below its peg. Holders rushed to redeem, the protocol minted Luna in vast quantities to absorb them, and the falling Luna price made the peg ever harder to defend: a classic death spiral. Within days Luna's supply exploded into the trillions and its price fell to effectively zero, erasing roughly $40 billion and triggering bankruptcies across crypto lending. Do Kwon fled, was arrested in Montenegro in 2023, extradited to the United States, and pleaded guilty to fraud charges in 2025.
The lesson: A yield that seems too good to be true usually is; Anchor's 20 percent came from subsidies and reflexive token value, not from genuine earnings.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $0.3 | $0 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 2020 would be $2,092 today.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Terra Luna is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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