Stephanie Douse 
Although the UST market cap has increased to flip BUSD, its trading volumes are still only about one-fifth the value of the Binance digital dollar.
Terra USD (UST), the algorithmic stablecoin on the Terra (LUNA) blockchain, has surpassed Binance USD (BUSD) to become the market’s third-largest stablecoin.
UST is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar that was launched in September 2020. To mint an equivalent amount of UST, a user must burn a reserve asset such as LUNA.
According to a report, UST’s total market capitalization has increased by 15% in the last 30 days to approximately $17.5 billion at the time of writing. UST is now the third-largest stablecoin, having flipped BUSD with a slightly lower market cap of $17.46 billion.
The asset is now only trailing industry giants Tether (USDT) at $82.8 billion and USD Coin (USDC) at $50 billion, but the gap is quite large at this stage.
According to the data, UST has been on a meteoric rise since mid-November, with the market capitalization increasing by 525 percent since then.
Despite outperforming BUSD in terms of market cap, UST is trading at a much lower volume, with Binance’s stablecoin seeing $2.26 billion in trading volume over the last 24 hours compared to UST’s $431.79 million.
Terra has recently made headlines, thanks in part to co-founder Do Kwon’s recent pledge that the project will amass a whopping $10 billion in Bitcoin (BTC) to back its UST reserves.
However, much like the wider crypto market recently, bullish announcements are doing little to push the price of LUNA higher. The token’s price has dropped 12.4 percent in the last 30 days to $77.31, and it has also dropped 34.4 percent since its all-time high of $119.18 on April 5.