Before the crash, UST had a marketcap of around $18.5b, and in just around 6 days it's down to around $1.4b. All that sold UST was mostly sold for Curve-supported stablecoins like DAI/USDT/USDC as they had the most on-chain liquidity.
I'd imagine if that happened then any salvaged luna that was sold - it wasn't too low when the peg first fell, I think it dropped by about a third in the first 12 hours - was probably converted to coins like eth to have a stake in the ecosystem with a lot less of the risk too then.
those large holders? but how did they know that it was time to cash out and buy another stablecoin or alt?
You might want to check their website's quick explanation video on how luna works to understand this better or see if it clicks while you watch it but essentially:
The protocol is based on the idea that a UST was always equal to a dollar of luna and a dollar of luna always equalled a UST (the luna and UST could both be minted via an interaction with their smart contracts on chain). When UST finally fell and lost its peg, each UST could still be burnt for a dollar's worth of luna causing that to crash too as the price of UST wasn't sustained - essentially, you could buy a dollar of luna for 95 cents for a while (and then 60 cents). The smallest losers in this scenario were the UST holders.
i have the feeling that there's inside job in this situation. a large amount of money got liquidated for few days and nobody knows anything? that's bs!
Terra Luna's redit made for an interesting read for me when this initially broke and more things have come to light since - apparently SK law enforcement have made attempts to freeze the assets of anyone involved with luna (afaik - there was a tweet about stopping any reserve funds from being moved out of their accounts).
It's speculated Do Kwon did a large OTC transfer just before that to trade newly minted UST for BTC (or something).
and now, do kwon is trying to save his face by introducing their luna 2.0? i hope people are not dumb enough to fall for another crap.
This has probably done even worse for his repuation and the price of original Luna (since even its creator has abandoned the coin).
Marketcaps are not a good methods to measure how much money actually got moved. It should be possible to pull the data on all the transactions and their value to know exactly how much money was moved out of Luna, especially if it happened on-chain and not centralized exchanges, because the latter probably don't keep their logs publicly available for many days.
This was something I've been thinking would be quite interesting, I might try to get a script going if I can find ethereum blockchain data for the past few weeks as exchanges like uniswap will definitely show up there.