Vitalik Buterin Claims Terra Luna Manipulated The Crypto Market

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New York Times columnist and famed podcaster Ezra Klein released his long interview with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin over the weekend, and it has some surprising statements in it indeed. Whereas last week, talking to Wired, Vitalik spoke of Tornado cash and Ethereum’s future post-merge, this time round he let it rip on Luna and it’s founder Do Kwon, claiming that the Terra team had ‘manipulated the market’.

Online arguments

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has never been one to mince his words. In the past he’s gotten into bitter online arguments with Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson (with whom he used to work at Ethereum) and even called Craig Wright (the Australian businessman who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto) an outright fraud.

This time round, as he was being interviewed by Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist asked what he believed caused this year’s crypto crash.

Vitalik said:

Nobody knows what the Luna Terra team were doing with Bitcoin or the asset. And they made a lot of promises. And look, they really tried hard at making these kind of very centralized efforts to manipulate the market and prop up their coin. But it ended up eventually failing, right? So I think that story is instructive, because it shows like to some extent, decentralization by itself doesn’t solve every problem.

Furthermore, Vitalik thought that the writing was on the wall, believing that plenty of “smart people” were saying that Terra was “fundamentally bad”

That’s quite the accusation of course and still not sure if he’s right. What I am sure of is that this will have a ripple effect if the original Terra Luna team ever tries to re-enter the market.