I finally got my hardcover copy of Freedom of Money by CZ Binance after importing it from Amazon. It is still hard to find in Thailand. 📘
I bought it mainly to read the Luna and UST chapter on pages 229-232.
More than four hours later, I was still reading.
This was also my first time reading a physical book again in many years. It was a very good feeling. Here is my honest review of the book from my view.
My review in one sentence: this book made CZ feel more human than the person we usually see behind a screen, on stage, or in a short post on X.
I came for the Terra story, then got pulled in by the life stories, decision-making, and the mindset behind building Binance.
It is the kind of book I want to read slowly by the sea, with a good drink nearby. Maybe more than one drink. 🍻
What I enjoyed most was the feeling that this was written by someone who has made difficult decisions under real pressure.
The book talks about growth, risk, people, users, and the consequences behind decisions. It made me think about my own experience inside the Terra Classic community.
That is why the Luna and UST chapter felt personal to me. I did not read it only as history. I lived through part of what came after.
I agree with one key point from the book, that was referred from his tweet.
The Luna and UST collapse had two major problems:
The risk in an algorithmic stablecoin model based on mint and burn mechanics
The way Terraform Labs responded during the crisis
A crisis is where leadership gets tested. When communication disappears, trust disappears even faster.
https://x.com/cz_binance/status/1525060769771048960
I was part of the Terra Classic community team that held an AMA with @cz_binance in late 2022.
We asked Binance to apply the 1.2% off-chain burn tax to LUNC trading.
The outcome became a 100% burn of Binance LUNC trading fees each month instead. For a community coming out of a collapse, that support meant a lot. 🔥
Soon after the 1.2% on-chain burn tax launched, governance voted to reduce it to 0.2% and split the tax between burn, Community Pool, and Oracle Pool.
I felt the change came too early. We had not gathered enough data on how the 1.2% tax affected on-chain activity.
Governance made its decision, and I respected it. This is part of being a community-led chain.
The first execution had a problem.
The tax split was not processed in real time. Funds were burned first, then re-minted into the Community Pool and Oracle Pool through seigniorage in later epochs.
Binance paused its fee burn for a period, then restarted at 50% of trading fees.
The lesson was clear: passing governance is only the first step. Execution must be correct too.
That implementation has since been fixed. The tax split now happens on-the-fly in real time.
Binance has continued burning 50% of LUNC trading fees.
This history matters because it shows what Terra Classic has done since the collapse: we made decisions, faced implementation problems, accepted feedback, and fixed the system.
That is what rebuilding looks like in real life. 🛠️
Many people outside our community only remember May 2022.
They do not know that Terra Classic continued through community governance, validators, developers, and builders who kept working after Terraform Labs moved on.
There are still teams creating utility for the chain, and there have been many efforts to find safer collateral-backed paths for USTC.
UST1 from the CL8Y Ecosystem is one current example of this work.
Terra Classic's active governance: https://validator.info/terra-classic/governance/passed
CL8Y Ecosystem: https://cl8y.com/pdfs/CL8Y_WHITEPAPER_V3.pdf
https://validator.info/terra-classic/governance/passed
I also learned from this book that Terra was one of the early investments of Binance Labs, now YZi Labs.
That history makes the Terra Classic story feel even more meaningful to me.
The community cannot erase the past. We can only keep proving what we learned from it: protect users, improve execution, stay transparent, and keep building useful things.
I hope you and the Binance team can see not only how Terra collapsed, but also what its community chose to do afterward. 🌕
Original post:
https://x.com/nuenghandsome/status/2107054371691479230