Binance Toasts 8.9 Billion LUNC in Latest Quarterly Burn

Binance burned 8.9 billion LUNC tokens today, which account for 50% of all spot and margi trading fees for the token in the last three months.

The amount burned was calculated from fees accrued between Nov. 30, 2022, and Feb. 27, 2023. Binance converted fees collected in USDT, BUSD, and BNB to LUNC before the burn. It sent the burn contribution to an address exempt from a 0.2% tax introduced by the LUNC community in October 2022.

Binance Waited for New Burn Address and Tax Exemption

The exchange postponed the burning until it was sure that the LUNC community could not remint fees in burn wallets according to Proposal 10,983. This proposal suggested that 50% of burn transactions be minted into a community pool that the LUNC community could use to rebuild the Terra ecosystem.

While receiving a 48% vote, the governance proposal was overturned by Proposal 11,111, which asserted that the protocol did not have stakeholders’ permission to remint 50% of the burned assets. 

Instead, the proposal suggested that the ecosystem move back to a 0.2% tax burn for all on-chain transactions on the Terra Classic blockchain. Upon reversion, ten percent of the tax burned would be reminted instead of 50% of the fee burn in Proposal 10,983.

Binance adopted LUNC trading fee burns in September 2022 after facing backlash from the LUNC community for a previous 1.2% tax burn proposal. It later burned 5.5 billion LUNC. The community later revised the tax burn to 0.2%, supported by Binance and KuCoin.

Sending a portion of LUNC trading fees to a burn address helps reduce the token’s circulating supply. The LUNC community initially advocated burning the coin to control its supply. Their main goal was to restore the $1 price of its sister stablecoin, Terra Classic.

LUNC, formerly LUNA, was part of an arbitrage function that kept the value of stablecoin TerraUSD, now Terra Classic, at $1. It fell to mere pennies after investors minted increasing volumes when large TerraUSD transactions knocked the stablecoin from its $1 peg on the weekend of May 7 – May 9, 2022.

Its value has since risen almost 17,000% to $0.00017080.

Bicasso Brings AI-Generated NFT Art to the Masses

On March 1, 2023, Binance’s also piloted its artificial intelligence NFT generator Bicasso. The tool minted 10,000 computer-generated images in 2.5 hours during a Beta trial.

According to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, the volume of mints stretched the image generation algorithm. Binance employees were working on expanding the tool’s server capacity after the mint. 

Users can seed the tool’s algorithm with keywords or upload an image for it to use. Zhao’s tweet revealed four artistic impressions of the founder’s photograph.

Image generators can create unique images using General Adversarial Networks that use data from thousands of images.

Eponym is a tool created by the art platform Art AI. It uses a text-to-image algorithm, like Binance, trained on art from different periods to create NFTs. Users can mint these NFTs directly on OpenSea.

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