Terra’s LUNA continues to climb higher and all eyes are on its price action to see if it can make a new ATH soon, past the previous level at $78, powered by rising adoption of Terra’s DeFi ecosystem and demand for its stablecoin UST. At the time of writing, LUNA/USD is trading around $74.74.

The native token of the Terra blockchain is one of the few coins in the crypto market to post weekly gains even as leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum struggle under key levels. The LUNA coin helps maintain price stability of the stablecoins within the blockchain network, most notably the Terra USD, which has been witnessing significant demand among DeFi users. A higher demand for UST drives up the burning of LUNA tokens as algorithms work to maintain the price of the stablecoin. The higher burn rate in turn drives up the value of the LUNA coin.

One of the biggest developments supporting LUNA’s ascent is Defi Llama’s data revealing that Terra has become the second largest ecosystem to support DeFi projects, coming in second after behemoth Ethereum. With only 13 DeFi protocols in its network at present, Terra enjoys a DeFi TVL of just under $17 billion, a far better performance than Binance Smart Chain which comes in third and supporting 222 protocols with a TVL of over $16.5 billion. Even other potential Ethereum killers Solana and Avalanche, both of which support more projects in this space have not been able to register the strong uptick in TVL Terra has seen in recent days.

Terra’s LUNA has seen its price soar through H2 2022, taking off after August when it traded around $10-11 and rising to an ATH of above $78 earlier this month. Over the past one year, it has given back gains worth more than 14,000% to investors, making it one of the top performing altcoins in 2021. In the past three months alone, the native token of Terra has registered nearly 200% in gains as more DeFi users turned to the UST coin.

The LUNA token has seen its price skyrocket in recent weeks following the Columbus-5 upgrade on Terra, ever since its community voted on a proposal to hike the burn rate. Even as most of the crypto market languishes following Bitcoin’s slide under the $50,000 mark, this token has been on the rise after its community decided to burn $4-5 billion worth of LUNA amid the soaring demand for the UST stablecoin in the market.

LUNA/USD Technical Analysis

According to the CEO of leading crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, Zhu Su, Terra’s LUNA has been showing signs of “majestic strength” after trading in the green over the past one month. He remains optimistic that this is no time to be bearish about the wider crypto sector especially when you consider the bullish performance of the LUNA token lately.

On the 4-hour chart of LUNA/USD, most of the moving averages as well as the MACD are suggesting a bullish bias. On the other hand, the momentum indicator reveals some presence of sellers in the market as well.

Terra’s LUNA is holding above the pivot point at $69.74 and there is room for buyers to take the price past the current ATH and to new highs in the near term. The next levels of interest to watch are just above the all-time high of $78 and then the immediate resistance at $87.43.