Terra (LUNA) has seen a significant surge over the past week as it attempts to recover from a recent price decline triggered by a broader crypto market downturn. At the time of writing, LUNA was trading at $56.30, up 2.4% in the last 24 hours.
LUNA is the native token of Terra, a blockchain protocol that uses fiat-backed stablecoins to influence global payment systems. Its 24-hour trading volume stands at $1,202,143,126, with a circulating supply of 400 million LUNA and a total supply of 819 million tokens.
Now let’s examine the main reasons behind Terra’s rally over the last seven days.
Reasons for Terra (LUNA)’s Price Increase
One major factor driving the recent upward trend was Terra’s announcement of a sports sponsorship agreement with Major League Baseball (MLB). This deal marks a notable milestone for the growing blockchain and represents one of the first instances of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) voting on a sports sponsorship agreement.
According to an official DAO proposal submitted to the Terra governance platform last week, Terra offered $38.5 million for a five-year sponsorship agreement with the Washington Nationals.
The proposal stated:
“We began dedicated sports coverage on Bitcoinist last year and can confidently say we have never seen a sports sponsorship like this. This is the first time we’ve seen a community vote via a DAO mechanism—specifically around a sponsorship deal secured with one of the ‘Big 4’ leagues (NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA) in North America… We’ve covered many pervasive sports sponsorships and partnerships over the last year and frankly, an MLB team was not on our shortlist. The NBA has probably led crypto-related deals, including the league-wide partnership with Coinbase and prominent team owner advocates like Mark Cuban. Additionally, major agreements such as Crypto.com acquiring naming rights to the arena in downtown Los Angeles and broader NBA blockchain-related initiatives have given that league a particularly unique position.”
MLB has previously worked with NFT platforms like Candy Digital and Topps, but direct team-level partnerships have been relatively rare. The same is true for the NHL and NFL, which so far have shown limited engagement with blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
For Terraform Labs and the Terra ecosystem, the deal is notable not only because it involves a major sports league but also because of the local visibility it brings in Washington, D.C.
The agreement arrives as Terra’s UST stablecoin has established itself as a leading decentralized stablecoin. The Terra ecosystem is seeking to expand beyond its flagship product and grow in new directions beyond the Anchor Protocol blockchain product.
In a statement released by the Nationals, Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon said:
“By approving this sponsorship agreement, the community has a new way to engage and educate the public, including policymakers doing important work in Washington, about decentralized money and the evolving technology that underpins it.”