Terra and Harmony announce DeFi partnership focused on UST stablecoin integration

“Terra is excited to expand our growing portfolio of DeFi products to multiple chains and working with Harmony to bring UST and Anchor to another growing ecosystem,” said Do Kwon, co-founder and CEO of Terra.

Terra, an algorithmic stablecoin platform for savings, investments and payments, is joining forces with the Harmony blockchain to pursue new DeFi initiatives focused on programmable money and other so-called financial primitives. 

Under the new partnership, which is described as a “deep integration” initiative, Terra will integrate Harmony on its Shuttle Bridge platform, a web front-end that allows users to send Terra’s UST stablecoin across supported blockchains. “This paves the way for UST to migrate to Harmony and to be used on applications in the Harmony Ecosystem,” Peter Abilla, Harmony’s VP of marketing, said in a Tuesday announcement.

TerraUSD is currently the fifth-largest stablecoin on the market, with a total capitalization of just over $1.9 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Terra enjoys the backing of several major blockchain firms, including leading venture capitalist Galaxy Digital. As Cointelegraph reported, news of Galaxy Digital’s investment in Terra sent the value of its LUNA token skyrocketing in February.

Harmony’s founder, Stephen Tse, said his company’s partnership with Terra supports its vision of building new products “in a multi-chain future.” He also touted Terra’s OneAnchor fixed-yield savings account, which will also be deployed on Harmony.

As a sharding protocol with a trustless Ethereum bridge, Harmony is tackling the scaling issue that is currently plaguing blockchain adoption. While Harmony pales in size compared with major competitors like Cosmos or Solana, the market capitalization of its network coin has more than doubled since February.

Related: DeFi proved resilient during the March 2020 and May 2021 market crises

Under the details of the partnership, Terraform Labs will provide direct support to projects that are building UST directly on Harmony. Both Harmony and Terra will collaborate on Harmony’s upcoming “Bridging Wall Street to Web3” Hackathon.