Even though the Chinese Government has put a blanket ban on cryptocurrency trading in the country, the people in the country continue to take keen interest in the ups and downs of the crypto market.
What Happened: After the native token of the Terra (CRYPTO: LUNA) blockchain crashed over 56% in 24 hours yesterday, Chinese users took to Weibo — the Chinese alternative to Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) — to post about the crash.
The token’s price plummeted as its stablecoin TerraUSD (CRYPTO: UST) lost its peg for the second time in 48 hours. According to data from Benzinga Pro, LUNA fell from an intra-day high of $64.62 to an intra-day low of $28.03 on Monday.
As the crypto market slumped, the hashtag "#luna" shot up to the list of top ten keywords on Weibo — which is used by 570 million people monthly. The microblogging site is widely regarded as a bellwether for public discussion in the country, where people have found workarounds using VPNs and continue to buy and sell all sorts of cryptocurrencies.
According to a TechCrunch report, the posts tagged with "#luna" had generated over 15 million views as of Monday evening.
The report further highlighted that it would be hard to estimate the exact number of people trading crypto in China. But, according to web analytics company SimilarWeb, nearly 10% of web traffic of OKX — a Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange for Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), and Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) — which consistently sits atop the 15 exchanges worldwide, comes from China.
Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, LUNA traded at $30.98, down 49.4% in the last 24 hours at the time of writing.
