Terra Developers Unveil 4-Year Plan to Revive LUNA Ecosystem

Terra developers floated a new proposal earlier this week as they look to revive the once-mighty ecosystem even as its controversial co-founder remains wanted by authorities.

Termed the “Terra Expedition,” the proposal is a revised iteration of the Developer Mining Program and Developer Alignment Program initially defined at the launch of the Terra blockchain.

The program will be funded with 9.5% of the total LUNA supply that was earmarked at the launch of the new Terra chain. This incentive program will run for 4 years and will be managed by a community-elected committee that will be evaluated every 12 months.

The revised proposal aims to better align incentives across the ecosystem and focus on attracting developers, onboarding users and promoting deep liquidity.

“The Terra Expedition is a 4-year program aimed at growing the Terra ecosystem through a series of initiatives with 3 main objectives, namely: Incentivising developers to build on Terra, Deepening liquidity on Terra, and Onboarding users to Terra,” the proposal read.

LUNA incentives via different programs

Of the allocation, some 20 million LUNA are earmarked for a developer grants program, one that aims to incentivize development on Terra to be paid upon successful audit and project launch on mainnet. Some examples of projects pointed out in the proposal include teams working on decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, stablecoin issuers, and derivatives protocols.

Projects will also be eligible for up to $40,000 in reimbursements for their smart contract audits. Crypto security remains a sore point in the ecosystem – with this month already becoming the worst for attacks and exploits in the history of cryptocurrencies.

Another 20 million LUNA will be floated to reward developers building on Terra. Any project deemed “essential” by the community – which has launched an app on Terra mainnet – will qualify for these incentives, with these incentives scheduled to be distributed every quarter, the proposal stated.

A liquidity mining incentive scheme of 50 million LUNA, distributed over 4 years, has also been proposed. These funds will be used to seed the initial liquidity of decentralized exchanges, stablecoins, bridges and other similar protocols built on Terra.

Additionally, developers have proposed to award five million LUNA in rewards to users. These include incentivizing the usage of bridges, or blockchain-based tools that transfer tokens between different networks, usage of decentralized applications (dApps) and rewards for minting non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The original proposal earmarked a certain portion of the total LUNA supply to be distributed based on the value locked up on Terra-based protocols, but such an allocation would now “mainly benefit a few protocols,” and thus not have the intended effect of kickstarting the Terra ecosystem.

As such, Terra-related applications lost some $28 billion in value following the May implosion of Terra and its LUNA and UST tokens. At writing, Terra-based applications have only $40 million in locked value spread over seven protocols.