Luna sales were expected to help UST maintain parity with the US dollar, according to the algorithmic stablecoin's design. The mechanism put a lot of downward pressure on Luna once UST lost its peg and investors rushed to cash out en masse. Worse, the more Luna's price dropped the more downward pressure. This set off a vicious cycle in which Luna's price plummeted, and supply grew exponentially.
The network issued 40 million Luna tokens on Tuesday. Luna's circulation supply rose on Wednesday, reaching 1.5 billion tokens.
Despite the chain being paused for a short time on Thursday, this achieved 176 billion tokens. It has now reached 6.5 trillion and is still increasing if the chain has not been terminated for the second time.
Developers working on Terra eventually called it a day. They chose to freeze the blockchain early Friday morning until they figured out a method to resurrect the project after the supply increased roughly 17,000 times in only three days.